There are some emotions that it feels like our society has reasonable scripts for dealing with. But, in my experience, grief has never really among them, particularly for those of us who don’t believe in any divinity or afterlife. We come back to the same canned platitudes, like “I’m sorry for your loss” because so much of what lies outside of those safe, rote lines feels in danger of slipping off one side of a knife-edge.
It seems unspeakably cruel to reinforce someone’s sense of despair, to tell them that their darkest voices are right. But positivity and optimism feel false, even insulting: hope we have no right to give. Sadness and anger at least have their roots in the world that still is. Grief is the acute awareness of an absence, something or someone ripped from the fabric of your life. Grief can destabilize; can feel like trying to learn how to walk after an amputation. With every step your muscle memory tries to lean back into the limb that isn’t there, and you wobble on, trying to find some new balance.
You can’t tell someone that an absence will be filled again, because it probably won’t be, not perfectly. There will always be nooks and crannies that stay empty, even with our best efforts. We can’t say that it will eventually get better. Broken things don’t always get rebuilt, and things we lose sometimes just… stay lost.
A year and a half ago, a good friend of mine died suddenly. I was far from the hardest hit by their death, but it did give me a painfully close encounter with grief. When I heard about their death, it felt like the universe had suddenly shuddered into an unthinkable, incoherent trajectory. The parts of my life that entwined around them were unquestioned solidity one minute, and utterly gone the next.
This year, I think many of us have become acquainted with a broader palette of grief and loss than we ever thought we would have to experience. Grief for human life is horrifying, and wrenching, and intense, and one of the worst feelings we have to endure. But on some basic level it’s something I expected I would have to face someday, part of the biological contract with mortality. Growing up, I never considered what it would feel like to feel grief for normality itself. To an even greater extent than the more typical forms of grief, it’s something that feels hard to talk about with the weight and nuance it deserves.
This is grief that we have even less of a language for.
This year, so many parts of my life, big and small, have turned into aching absences. I imagine the same is true for many of you.
Late night conversations at crowded parties, leaning your head on a friend’s shoulder without thinking. The uncomplicated certainty of knowing you’ll visit your family at the holidays. The tingling excitement of stepping onto an airplane going someplace new, without having to worry how tightly your mask is fitting. Social institutions you’ve invested in and cared deeply about that simply can’t translate to the digital. Communities that used to be full of warmth and dynamism, now ghostly remnants trying to subsist on the forms of connection that remain.
When I look at my own life, it can be hard to even account for all the things I’ve lost, since, some days, it feels like my world is filled up more by the empty spaces left behind than by the handful of things I’ve managed to cling to.
It’s probably the case that we’ve not lost all of these things permanently. But we don’t really know yet what the world will look like after this.
This is loss, and what I felt for all those little experiences of normality was grief, but it took me a while to acknowledge that to myself. It felt stupid and insignificant to put the loss I felt for these small joys and wonders in the same category as the loss of human life. Who was I to claim to be grieving, I asked myself. I hadn’t even known anyone who had died in the pandemic. They were the only ones who had the right to that emotion.
But there is not some fixed pool of grief in the world, that my taking the emotional frame robs it from someone who needs it more. In my non-theological view of things, there are no spirits to be offended by the comparison, no dead we are dishonoring… there are just people, trying to put their worlds back together. Grief is for the living. And all can mourn our different forms of brokenness together, without that implying a claim that our losses are equal.
Telling ourselves that what we lost was trivial in some cosmic, objective sense is just unnecessary cruelty, when we know it wasn’t trivial for us.
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For me, the hardest part of processing my grief for the world as it was before this year has been convincing myself to remember how things were… but not to be consumed by that remembering. It can be hard for me to choose to conjure up the bright colors of the past, when I know that doing so will make the pain of returning to the muted, grey affordances of today even more stark.
It’s easier to just forget what “community” really felt like. What “excitement” felt like. What “optimism” felt like. Because the less I remember them, the less I’ll have to feel the weight of their absence, the massive outlines in my life where they used to be. The less I’ll be overwhelmed into paralysis by the magnitude of the loss. It’s really, really tempting to shut all that out.
But I worry that, if I do shut it out, I’ll curl myself up too small to fit what’s left, and become too used to only inhabiting the smallness of the present world. That when the world opens up, and there’s room for good things to grow again, I’ll have lost the muscle memory I would need to inhabit the spaciousness of that possibility, to fill the newfound space with ambitious and valuable and lovely things. To plant seeds in a garden I may not get to see grow to be as strong as it was before the world broke. And, at least for me, I think rebuilding will mean somehow keeping my memories of the good things alive and real-feeling long enough for them to give me a blueprint for the institutions and connections and investments I’ll want to be able to bring back into the world someday. Even though it hurts to go back to grey after remembering a world of color.
If it’s right for you, take 15 seconds now to really remember what some of the good things that this year has taken away felt like.
Ultimately, our obligation is to the future. Sometimes, fulfilling that obligation means stoking a fire higher, giving it fuel to light the night. But, sometimes, it means finding a few embers amidst the ashes, and keeping them safe until they can light a new batch of kindling. Even if the embers won’t be enough to really keep you warm, and in the meantime all you’ll have is the memory of fire.
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