just enough light

For three minutes last Saturday, people across China stopped what they were doing. In urban centers, all traffic lights went to red, everything came to halt. People bowed their heads, stood in silence, and paid respect to the thousands of friends, family, patients and medical workers who had died in the pandemic.

How wise. A national day of mourning including 3 minutes of silence throughout the country. We could learn some things from China about national grieving. In my work over the years with grieving clients, they have taught me the importance of intentionally acknowledging loss, of giving grief space in their lives, and finding ways of expressing their pain emotionally and behaviorally.

In our culture of “we gotta get back to work,” we are not very good at mourning our losses. We tend to want to hitch up our britches and say, “That’s that,” and get back to doing whatever it was we were doing before the trauma. It’s not that simple. Without some way to acknowledge our losses, the grief remains, and we get back to work at our own peril.

Loss is an inevitable part of life, and grief is a necessary part of loss. Most of us have not experienced a direct loss (yet) in this pandemic, but what we have been seeing these past several weeks in the media is an assault on our ability to make sense of it. We are stunned to consider the hundreds of thousands around the globe whose lives have been ended or upended. We grieve as a nation over the tens of thousands who live within our borders that have died, those who are suffering, and those who, in caring for the suffering, live in terror of being infected. We grieve locally for a death toll yet to be determined, and we have a personal grieving over what we each have lost in terms of the life we once knew and called normal.

And we are not done yet. We will have loss of life and loss of livelihood for weeks and months to come. At the time of writing this, Abilene has a small but growing number of cases, and our first death. For most of us, the tragedy still seems far away, but we cannot deny the growing dread that what we see in other parts of the country will soon be in our own city limits.

Already we are more cautious than ever about leaving the house on a normal errand, about encountering people in stores, if we even go to stores any more. We grieve the luxury of being complacent about getting out, driving around, going for coffee, meeting a friend for lunch, going to church. Whatever the new normal is in the future, it will involve some losses.

If we do not take the time and pay attention to what and to whom we have lost, we will also fail to learn some important lessons, and the unacknowledged grief will inhibit our efforts to “get back to normal.” If we ignore our grief, we will too easily forget the lesson of unpreparedness, on a personal, community, and national level. We will fail to learn to lessons of connection to others and the value of those essential people that we took for granted before all this. If we are too eager to put this all behind us, we will fail to learn the lessons of paying attention to the things and people immediately around us. We will fail to learn about our own resilience and about our own weaknesses, both of which emerge during a crisis.

A national day of mourning would be a start, but with the certainty that we will be burying our friends, neighbors, family members, and fellow citizens for weeks or months to come, a regular time each week to stop, to be still, and to pay attention seems even more appropriate. It would provide us with a tangible way to pause the distractions we’re all getting pretty good at, to cut through the denial, and pay attention.

We will be better prepared to establish a new normal if we take the time now and in the coming months to mourn our losses.

Printed in the Abilene Reporter News, Sunday, April 12, 2020