Facebook is a rough place to mourn. When we reached a million dead from COVID in the US this month, I put up a post saying it seems there’ll be no memorial, no park with sculptures where we can gather to share common grief and remember the dead, many of whom passed in isolation. I asked the audience at large what we do with all this loss now that we’re anxious to move ahead and put dark and confusing days behind us.
My intention with the post was to mourn with a larger group, grief being both a private and an external, communicated activity. I wanted to engage with others who felt the same, affirming our relationship with these million dead. I responded and liked and put up heart emojis. I fielded those who wanted to know why I was grieving people who had died from COVID when there are so many teen suicides and drug overdoses. Many replies and shares brought up voting and political parties. From what I could see, we were all tender.
Grieving, for me, is remembering. In the heart of the pandemic I traveled to the Navajo Nation in Arizona and the place felt like an active war zone, one of the hardest hit regions in the country. Doctors I interviewed talked about medical staff dying in the clinics where they worked. The atmosphere was devastating and haunting, road signs along the highway telling people to turn back, a piece of fresh graffiti saying GO HOME.
When I came home shell shocked to Colorado, I spoke with people who told me this pandemic wasn’t happening, the virus was a hoax. When I said I was writing about what I witnessed, one person asked why I was fear mongering.
To memorialize the dead, I want to remember the context of their deaths, connecting and reconnecting to my own experiences, the sadness I felt as numbers rose from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. I want to remember storming out of a dear friend’s house shouting at him that he can live in his bubble where he keeps saying he doesn’t personally know anyone who’s died of the virus. I want to remember the difficulty we have all felt, no matter our persuasions. This makes the grief communal.
In 2021, American political artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg planted more than 660,000 white flags in the lawn of the Washington Monument representing those in the US who had died of COVID at the time. She invited people to write names of the dead on these flags. Firstenberg told one news outlet, “Those who have come to write on flags, they’ve told me repeatedly, ‘We feel like we’re no longer alone.’ They realize that all this time they were grieving in isolation – they had a lot of company.”*
I’m looking for company, as if turning to those around me and asking if you find yourself crying more easily, maybe at the drop of hat. Do words hurt more than usual? I’d say our collective skin is a bit thinner. We’re all a little jumpy, even those who don’t think it’s happening. Maybe especially them. Actively engaging with feelings and thoughts around loss is known to bring notable, long-term psychological improvement. Not engaging can be known as “complicated grief,” or, clinically, “persistent complex bereavement disorder,” where the inability to mourn becomes pathological, leading to psychological degradation. Or sometimes it’s easier just to say the loss doesn’t matter. But it does.
Dr. John Tveten, a doctor I spoke with in northern Arizona, told me that he would be buried in protective gear which made him look like a monster to those he was caring for. A gentle and disarming man, Dr. Tveten is accustomed to using his voice and touch to help people, and this was nothing of the sort. His ward clerk at the Little Colorado Medical Center in Winslow, Arizona, died of COVID and he sat beside her bed holding her hand in his gloved hand. After her, the next ward clerk was hospitalized with the same virus and put in the same bed where she survived. Dr. Tveten published an article about the experience. He wrote, “Double masked and gloved, armor in place, I sit on your bed and hold your hand. It is the best medicine I can offer. There is no distance. I remain hopeful. You remain strong. We make a pact to hug.”
Dr. Tveten told me he never thought he’d be around for an international tragedy on such an historic scale. It’s an honor he’d rather not have, but here it is. His mourning came out in writing. Mine comes out in walks alone, or sitting quietly, but sometimes I need it shared. In the face of a million dead from a single, sudden cause, it seems like someone should say something, or at least put words on a white flag. We find places for collective remembering — maybe here on this page — where we might pause for a moment, breathe deeply, and hold the loss in our hands.
Photo by Craig Childs
* in: Jeffrey A. Bennett (2022): Mourning and memorializing in the COVID-19 era,
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
Craig, I truly share your pain along with the many others around the world who have been directly affected by this disease, a disease which we must sit and wait out. I just wish we were equally affected by the death and losses suffered by the many who are directly affected by war. War is a disease which we can control. We don’t need to wait for a new pill or a new vaccine to be created in some science lab. We only need to understand the suffering it brings to so many people and other living things in seemingly far off places in an ever growing smaller world. War is not some small threat that one can only see when placed on a slide under a microscope. War is an in our face reality for someone, somewhere in a not so far away place. It is a cruel reality which all of us can see; and, it is a reality which can not be cured in a lab. War and the hate it breeds can only be cured by its antithesis. Only Love and Peace can cure War.
I left social media entirely about a year ago because of the sorts of responses you mention. I was grieving the loss of six family members, two friends, and my own health. And I knew I was not alone. I wanted something I can’t quite define – companionship maybe? Communal grieving? I’m not sure what to call it. Moments best represented, in my mind anyway, to sitting with someone on a hilltop not saying anything. Just being.
I thought when I left FB and Twitter, that I would feel more isolated, more alone. Instead, when the “must check in” impulse faded, I felt free. And I realized that I hadn’t ever really connected with anyone in a meaningful way on social media. I checked my accounts after a few months and found that no one had missed me. I checked my inner self and found I was quieter, calmer. I was connecting more with my in-person friends. I was getting those quiet moments physically together. So I deleted my accounts permanently and have never looked back.
The poet David Whyte says that “the only cure for grief is grief.” And the enormity of it leads to what I feel is a new kind of grief, on which we have no experience of nor knowledge of: how to grieve such immense loss? And that is combined with the utterly strange phenomena of denial… is that perhaps, in part, a psychological, albeit unconscious, effort to avoid the pain? Pain and sorrow that we struggle to fathom, let alone process. How to heal ourselves? How to heal our communities? How to heal our nation? Our human family? Our planet?
Thank you for sharing your experience and sorrows here… clearly, we are far from done with this and it is far from done with us.
I have long suffered from a severe anxiety disorder. I get intermittent respites – sometimes with clear cause, sometimes randomly. I am not directly afraid of Covid, but my generalized anxiety is escalating hourly. I write this because one of my medicines for my fear has always been to help others (or, at my worst, tell them how they could fix what was troubling them!) and maybe my writing about this familiar fear will let them know that they are not alone. At the moment, I fear Alzheimer’s, with little evidence to support that. I fear that I am slipping into a manic phase – again with no evidence. I do live with intermittent ocular migraines – a temporary frightening disruption of normal vision followed by anxiety – and they have kicked in. Bright light (oh great, it is summer) is a trigger. I recently read a report on the internet that general human anxiety is escalating – partly in response to our fears around Covid. I make myself trust that that escalation is what I am experiencing. And I am not alone.
For what it’s worth, Mary, my ancient anxieties have kicked back in too during these days of covid. I don’t know if it’s any help to know this, but you are not alone.
You surely are not alone… My anxieties have amped up in the last two years big time. For two years my life partner has needed to live elsewhere due to unusual health issues. How much can be piled on? Yet I am not alone, just as you are not alone. We will live through this together and emerge out the other side, birthed into a newness we’ve not ever experienced. Thank you, Craig, for this article—and everything you write— that reminds us we ARE connected.
I’m with you all, feeling this weight, or ungroundedness, or both at once. I find refuge sitting on big rocks, but most of the time I’m not sitting on big rocks. Yesterday I was giving a presentation with a Hopi man and we talked about rock art that is clean and beautiful, made in healthy ages, and rock art that looks sloppy or unfinished, possibly made when rains didn’t come or times of hunger or conflict, when people could scarcely spend time on creative work. We both agreed that the rougher rock art was somehow a good sign, that even in hard times expression and story telling kept happening. In fact, it may be most important then. My friend talked about his beadwork, and how these two very tough years at Hopi have left him bereft of creativity. But now, he said, it is time to get back to work on art. I supposed that’s my other refuge, besides the rocks. Do something beautiful. Especially now, it might help.