Abstract
Beginning in March 2020, as the pandemic moved into our central collective consciousness, I opened a blank document on my desktop to chronicle what language people were using to describe their perceptions of “these times.” These rhetorical attempts at understanding now opened and closed e-mails, punctuated news conferences, and were exchanged during the many newly discovered Zoom calls discussing what might lay ahead. This is a small sampling of what I gathered:
These unprecedented times
These challenging times
These dynamic times
These strange times
These ever-changing times
These times of utter madness
These harrowing times
This surreal time
These anachronistic times
These historic times
These coo coo bananas times
These scary times
These complicated times
This grief filled time
These times for opportunity
This ongoing stretch of time
We were entering into time new and unknown. Would this be a temporary or more permanent experience? Would there be silver linings to guide us through, or did such notions somehow negate the enormity of sorrow that kept coming, wave after wave of distress and despair and loss? Loss due to COVID-19. Loss due to mental health crises. Loss due to misinformation. Loss due to historic and continued racism. Loss of life, loss of health, and loss of work. Loss of any sense of what “normal” is or was or ever would be again.
At the close of 2020, I moved through another kind of loss: the loss of a pregnancy. In my second trimester, medical complications arose that brought about one of the most emotionally and physically painful experiences of my life. An experience marked by physically distanced waiting rooms, areas that my husband could not enter, and tears shed among medical clinicians whose whole faces I may never know. My arms ached for the caring friends I could not embrace, my heart shattered to share such news with family through the sterile lens of a computer screen.
As a pediatric palliative care social worker, I thought often of the many families who have shared their stories of varied excruciating prenatal experiences. My heart bowed before those I have worked with who are bereaved, and I held deepened reverence for the enormity of their pain. I remembered their description of time and of any sense of “normality” feeling forever redefined. And as I moved through the initial crawl toward my own healing, I felt even more keenly aware of the totality of the loss in our communities, our nation, our world, over this past year—in ways known and in ways still yet to come.
A few days after losing the pregnancy, I felt well enough to take a walk. As I passed the masked faces familiar and new, I thought:
These unprecedented times
This grief filled time
These times for opportunity
Who have you lost?
What have you lost?
Your loved one?
Your job?
Your dreams?
And you?
And you?
And you?
As I approached my return to work after a leave of absence, I understood that it would not be a reentry into “normal” times. Into some experience of the familiar, the same as it was before. For my pregnancy loss is something that I will always carry. This grief will always walk with me in my heart and mind and it will inform my experience of the future. Bereaved families had taught me this, mentors had guided the way with their teachings, and I now knew it to be centrally true as I entered the path ahead. I also knew my personal reentry would be surrounded by an extraordinary team of colleagues, gifted with an exquisite understanding of grief. A knowledge that grief is not linear, that sorrow takes many forms—and that time and compassion and gentleness can create the ability to build toward a new reality ahead. I recognized what a profound gift this would be, and I could not imagine the time ahead without it.
After returning to the hospital, I found myself noting the shifts in discussions between clinicians, patients, and families. While I had been away, health care workers had begun to receive the vaccine against COVID-19. As 2021 progressed, vaccine distribution to the wider population in tandem with falling case numbers seemed to once again be pressing our collective consciousness up against our considerations of time:
What will it be like?
What will it feel like?
Will it feel normal?
Familiar?
Recognizable?
The same as it was before?
Weeks later, I was at the grocery store. With restrictions somewhat lifted, there were markedly more people allowed inside than in the months before, and instead of faces more joyful for a sense of a familiar experience of time, the air was full of tension and of heartache. Sorrowful faces searching for celery, heavy sighs shared as we maintained our physical distance. And I wondered if this was a call to us all—is the time ahead actually the time unprecedented, a forever shattering of any previous notions of what normal time is or was or ever should be again?
Who have you lost?
What have you lost?
Your favorite person?
Your sense of safety?
Your community?
Your future?
And you?
And you?
And you?
As health care professionals, we are given training surrounding empathy and compassion within our various specialties. Yet it is the time ahead that calls for a deepened attunement of such care beyond our practices, to our neighbors, our families, and ourselves. If only the world's reentry into life after COVID-19 could have the support of a group of people exquisitely familiar with grief as I have had the gift of having. A knowledge that grief is not linear, that sorrow takes many forms—and that time and compassion and gentleness can create the ability to build toward a new reality ahead. If only we could treat each other and ourselves with enduring compassion and unending respect, open and willing to join together over time into an ever-shifting re-emergence. For it is not, should not, and cannot be back to normal times.