The New Ways Deal with Grief During the Pandemic
With loss all around us, we’re tempted to withdraw deeper into ourselves, to keep love at bay, to not feel pain. Ironically, that’s when grief can support us. Yes, grief.
New Ways to Grieve
By Robyn M Fritz
Grief is an emotion that helps us process change. In the pandemic, we are grieving our loss of freedom and fear and deceased loved ones. Mourning our dead is more challenging because we can’t have ordinary funerals. But our dead are still waiting for us to honor and celebrate them—with them—some tips on dealing with grief in the pandemic.
When we think about grief, our first thoughts are usually about the devastation we feel when our human and animal beloveds die. But grief is an emotion that helps us process change. What we’re going through with the pandemic is a global change that has ripped away from the basic assumptions of how we live in community, from how we work to how we love.
With loss all around us, we’re tempted to withdraw deeper into ourselves, to keep love at bay, to not feel pain. Ironically, that’s when grief can support us. Yes, grief.
Grief in a Time of Crisis
As an emotion that helps us process change, grief is cathartic, allowing us to release pent-up feelings that keep us frozen in place, unable to move forward. The problem right now is that many people are reluctant to acknowledge their feelings. They’re living on the edge, lost in a newly dangerous world, fearing a tsunami of emotion that could incapacitate them. They believe that being strong—for themselves and their families—means bottling it up: if the feelings can’t get out, things can’t worsen.
We can deal with these feelings first by calmly recognizing them. Many people right now just want things to get back to normal, whatever that is for them. Yes, we all do—and that feeling is grief.
We want to freely move in public without fear. An invisible enemy will kill us, to gather with friends and loved ones, to go back to work, to just be safe. We’re grieving for a way of life, freedom of movement, a lack of fear that we don’t have anymore, and may not have again for weeks or months.
That’s okay. We should be grieving the disruptions we’ve experienced.
We’re also grieving, feeling fear. We fear that loved ones, or we will get sick and even die. We fear lost income and even lost purpose. We are afraid because things are so different: in the U.S., wearing face masks and protective gloves, being confined, standing in grocery store lines, and finding empty shelves are abnormal. It’s okay to grieve these changes. Grieving helps to acknowledge the loss, grieving it, and allowing it to move through us helps us move on.
Grief and Death in the Pandemic
There is another aspect to grieving in the pandemic: how we are forced to acknowledge the deaths of our beloveds. Funerals are necessary rites of passage in our society, allowing the community to honor the deceased—and life moving on. But in the pandemic, families either can’t hold physical funerals or just leave people out. Yes, alternatives are cropping up, from delaying funerals entirely to making them virtual.
For many, though, that means grief is on hold. But it doesn’t have to be. Why? Because the dead don’t care when you have a funeral—or what it looks like. They simply need the occasion to come together with the living to honor the change that death brings. As a medium, I know that the dead attend their funerals and that anything goes. That means, no matter how long ago a beloved died, you can honor their memory with a ritual that works for you. It can be as simple as, “Hey, you, I miss you,” to an elaborate ceremony—even if it’s just you, or the people you’re quarantined with.
Creating Rituals to Resolve Grief
Grief sticks around longer than it needs to if it is not acknowledged. While there isn’t a time table for when grieving should end (because it doesn’t, it merely blends into our lives), try creating a ritual to help process grief, whether it’s for a beloved dead or the times we’re living in.
If it’s for the dead, first set time, tell your beloveds when it will be, and invite their spiritual teams and yours to join you. Then decide what honoring the dead (and the living) looks like. It can be reading a poem, or recounting memories, playing music, dancing, a meal with toasts—something you know the dead would have appreciated when they’re alive. (I guarantee they’ll love it, even the cranky ones which might have said they didn’t want a funeral.) Create something that brings the body, mind, and spirit together. And repeat it as many times, and with as many variations, as you want.
Whether you’re grieving a beloved or the circumstances of the pandemic, set a time and invite your spiritual team to join you. When you’re ready, simply say out loud what you’re grieving, think about it, and feel it in body, mind, and spirit. Sit with those feelings. When it’s time to end the ritual, invite the grief to move through you and out. As it leaves, thank your spiritual team for joining you—and you’re done.
Here is what happens in body, mind, and spirit when we allow ourselves to grieve: we help energy keep moving. When energy is stuck, grief becomes what people dread: something that weighs us down and keeps us moving forward. Acknowledging that it’s okay to feel grief helps us to process change and will help us keep energy moving. And us moving forward.
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About the Author
Robyn M Fritz, MA MBA CHt, is an intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist. An award-winning author, her next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com and on Facebook at The Practical Intuitive.
