Category: Grief

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Kids Are Grieving, Too

Parents are facing difficult moments as children confront the death of a loved one, something they may not fully understand.

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

The coronavirus pandemic has taken more than a quarter of a million lives, many of them mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents — adults who have left grieving children behind. Many more children will lose loved ones in the coming months. Here’s some guidance on how to talk to kids about illness and death, and how to support them when someone they love dies.

Be Honest

It can be hard to know how much to share with kids right now. We want to prepare them for what might happen, but we don’t want to needlessly terrify them. Still, if a family member or friend becomes seriously ill, it’s best to be honest about what’s going on, even if you don’t know exactly how things will play out, according to Joseph Primo, the chief executive of Good Grief, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that helps children deal with loss and grief. It’s a good idea, for instance, to tell your kids that grandma has the coronavirus and that even though lots of people are trying to help her, nobody knows whether she will get better.

This honesty might go against your protective instincts, but when we share our feelings and our vulnerability, it makes it easier for our kids to open up about what’s worrying them, and our honesty builds their trust, Primo said.

If someone close to your child is sick, it might also be wise to go over what your family is doing to stay safe, according to Robin Goodman, Ph.D., a certified trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapist based in New York. You might say, “‘That’s why we take care of you, that’s why you wash your hands, that’s why we’re careful when we go outside with a mask,’” Dr. Goodman said. Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Ph.D., a New Jersey-based clinical psychologist and author of “What’s My Child Thinking?,” also emphasized honesty — don’t lie by asserting that you’re all definitely going to be fine. “You can’t give any guarantees, but you can say, ‘my plan is to be around for a very long time,’” she said.

Explain Death

If a loved one dies, it’s best to avoid euphemisms, Primo said. If you tell children that grandpa’s just sleeping or he’s gone somewhere else, they might continue to believe that grandpa will come back or eventually wake up, and not process what happened. “When we try to protect kids by sugarcoating things and not giving them the real information, they end up constructing a narrative that is often far more scary than reality,” Primo said.

Dr. Goodman said that it was best to tell your kids that grandpa died, and then make sure they understand what death means. Tell them, “Once you die, you can’t come back, that your body doesn’t work anymore,” she said. It can help to differentiate what it means to be alive versus dead — to explain that people who are alive can watch TV, brush their teeth, eat and sleep, but that people who are dead cannot.

Correct Misconceptions

Children under 5 probably won’t be able to grasp the permanence of death. They may continue to ask when grandpa is coming back. That’s normal and age-appropriate; just patiently remind them that he died and is not coming back. “It doesn’t mean they’re avoiding it, denying it, not understanding it, it’s because that’s developmentally what they understand,” Dr. Goodman said.

It’s also common for children to worry that they caused a loved one’s death, Dr. Kennedy-Moore said. “The idea that terrible things can happen ‘just because’ is terrifying,” she said. “On some level, it’s painful — but less terrifying — to think that they did something to cause it.” To ease your child’s mind, Primo advises against chiding them or flat-out telling them they’re wrong. Doing so won’t change their mind — it’ll just make them feel like they can’t talk to you about it, he said.

Primo suggested that parents engage with the idea and ask the child why they feel responsible. You want to “explore the thought, keep providing facts delicately, and give them the space and time to process it,” he said. “The kid who gets onto the other side of this thought more quickly is going to be the one who was allowed to live with it for a little bit longer — and to dissect it and to realize, ‘oh, no, that wasn’t me, that’s not how this works.’”

It’s crucial to give your children the opportunity to talk about the death if they want to — and to gently help them understand what happened and why. Dr. Judith Cohen, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Drexel University College of Medicine and the medical director of the Allegheny General Hospital Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents in Pittsburgh, witnessed her sister’s sudden death when she was 6, and no one engaged with her about it afterward. “I have a strong belief that when parents don’t talk about it, children develop negative beliefs about what they should have done, what they could have done, and why it happened. That can be very difficult, if not damaging, to their understanding of themselves and the world around them,” she said.

Share Coping Strategies

Funerals aren’t possible for many families right now, so it’s helpful to come up with other ways to remember and memorialize the person who has died. (If a funeral is taking place, you still might want to give your child the option of staying home — not all children like to attend funerals, and that’s OK, Dr. Goodman said.) Maybe you plant a tree in the backyard to remember them, bake their favorite bread, watch their favorite movie or make a special photo album.

Remember, too, that grief doesn’t follow a schedule. American culture expects people to mourn quickly — to cry at the funeral and then feel a sense of “closure” and move on — but these expectations aren’t particularly healthy or appropriate. “Ultimately, the purpose of mourning and memorializing is to foster an ongoing sense of connection with the person who died,” Primo said, and that means “we can memorialize and remember as often as we want.”

It’s also OK for your kids to see you feeling sad and to engage with them about your grief, according to Robyn Silverman, Ph.D., a child and teen development specialist who hosts the podcast “How To Talk To Your Kids About Anything.” “When you talk about your own feelings about anything, it opens the door for the child to talk about theirs — it gives them that permission,” she said.

If your children are having trouble talking about their feelings, Dr. Kennedy-Moore suggested getting out a pack of index cards and asking your child to help you brainstorm various emotions, writing one emotion down on each card (and making sure to include feelings like “sad” and “lonely.”) Then, ask your child to sort the cards into three piles: A “yes” pile (for feelings they’re feeling right now), a “no” pile (for feelings they aren’t experiencing), and a “maybe a little bit” pile. Then, ask them to go through each of the cards in the “yes” and “maybe a little bit” piles, pausing on each one to explain why they believe they are feeling that way. Dr. Kennedy-Moore said that parents should try not to “fix” their children’s feelings or talk them out of having them, but just to briefly acknowledge them. This approach encourages kids to name and engage with their emotions, which “makes those big, messy feelings seem more understandable, and therefore more manageable,” she said. (Sesame Street also has online resources to help children understand and talk about their emotions when they are grieving.)

Support Your Grieving Child

Children often grieve differently than adults — and on a different schedule. They might be upset for a few minutes, and then seem totally fine, and then a few hours later feel sad again. “They grieve deeply, but they don’t hold on to those feelings forever,” Dr. Cohen said. Also, kids may not mourn all that much after they have lost a relative they only rarely saw, and that’s fine. This doesn’t mean they didn’t love them.

If you sense that your child is doing things to avoid engaging with their grief — refusing to talk about grandma or the memories they have of her — “therapy can be helpful,” Dr. Cohen said. Reach out to your pediatrician, a child therapist or a grief counselor for recommendations.

Finally, grieving children can benefit from following a somewhat normal home routine, Dr. Goodman said. This can be tough during a pandemic and especially after a loved one dies — nothing is going to feel normal at that point — but a routine can provide children with a sense of control and reassurance that everything is going to be OK. It tells them that even though things are so very hard right now, life is going to go on.

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Who Knows Where the Time Goes

We are all in a box, and in those boxes we are grieving.

By Roger Cohen

Absent any other marker, nature indicates the passage of time. Daffodils and hyacinths give way to roses. Blossoms fall, new leaves bud, pink petals are gone from empty New York streets. Frozen figures in rumpled clothes may note some slight change in the canvas. Who knows where the time goes?

We met in the warm season. We met in the cold season. It becomes possible to imagine time reordered in such a way. Oh, yes, in the warm season, I remember the peonies. A friend tells me her marker of time’s passage in Paris has become the advancing decomposition of a dead rat in the bike lane on her circumscribed daily outing. Who knows where the time goes?

We are all in a box. A smaller or larger Zoom box, depending on the number of people in the conversation. A sidewalk box that sets appropriate social distancing. The box behind the new plastic panels in stores, the box of four too-familiar walls, a mental box of insistent yet unanswerable questions; and in those boxes we are all grieving.

Grieving for a loved one lost to the coronavirus, for lost cities, for lost worlds, for America lost. The virus has revealed a nation in decomposition, incapable of coherence, un-led, angry, disoriented, scattered.

The pathogen itself becomes a political Rorschach test, perceived according to tribal allegiance. The vice president refuses to wear a mask on a visit to the Mayo Clinic, a wink to one of those tribes. Why the heck did the hospital break its own rules and let him in?

Because there are no rules anymore. Who would have thought it is possible to become nostalgic for alternate-side New York parking, that implacable marker of the days? Anything is possible; the proof is before our eyes.

Grieving is not missing. We miss conviviality. We grieve for life. For loves lost and retraced, for the precious moment unappreciated. Perhaps at root we grieve for the failure of our imaginations.

That is to say for our inability to grasp what W.G. Sebald, the German writer, called “the ghosts of repetition,” the ever-recurring patterns of dislocation and disaster that punctuate human history until they impose themselves on the present.

A middle-aged woman sits on the steps of a synagogue sobbing. A young woman props her bike against a fence and sobs. It seems indelicate to intrude on such grief. The loss of time itself can engender a terrible emptiness. I see the clock without hands, and the face without features, in the deserted streets of the shattering nightmare sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.” Who knows where the time goes?

Speaking of dreams, here is another one. A friend finds herself in a cumbersome crude contraption that looks like a beekeeper’s bonnet but is made of sheets of clear plastic screwed together with wood framing. She cannot figure out why it is there, until she learns that banks now require clients to box their faces in this way to get money from an A.T.M. Perhaps, in intimate circles, the box-bonnet bump will replace the elbow bump.

In our boxes, the great health-versus-wealth debate rages. How, when and where to restart the economy, the appropriateness of this or that trade-off. As if the great trade-offs that produced this dysfunctional America had not already happened.

The trade-offs that disempowered the body politic and democratic practice, and empowered special interests and the wealthy; that starved a health system that might have helped people survive better; that conferred sanctity on soaring executive compensation but not on a decent living wage for the mass of Americans; and on and on and on.

The pandemic is also an urgent call for national and personal reinvention and rebalancing. After the Black Death came the Renaissance. From the depths of economic horror came Roosevelt’s New Deal. From this horror, so far, come the senseless twists and turns of the orange Narcissus.

Bandits hold sway. I have visions of Howard Beale in “Network,” and his I’m-as-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-this-anymore that brought screaming Americans to their windows.

“All of humanity’s problems,” said Blaise Pascal, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We are learning. Seeing frenetic consumption for what it was, shuddering at the frantic quest for distraction and status in the time before.

I have been listening to “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” Fairport Convention, 1969, wonderful song, transporting. Turned time’s arrow backward for me, listening to Pink Floyd in Hyde Park in 1968. An ache, we all feel it now.

A cemetery may seem an unlikely source of solace, but Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, ranging over 478 acres, is a beautiful sanctuary. At the main entrance, a large colony of blue-green parrots has established itself. Urban legend has it the birds escaped from a transport at J.F.K. I watched them for a while swooping in mesmeric patterns with twigs in their mouths to add to a multistoried nest that appears to need no additions whatsoever. The parrots get on with their D.I.Y. anyway.

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In the Coronavirus Crisis, I Can’t Visit My Sick Mother

—So I Wear Her Perfume Instead

By Matt Ortile

I woke up terrified last Friday. Or was it last Thursday? Maybe yesterday. Today?

Each day bleeds into the next when in social isolation to hinder the spread of the novel coronavirus. This pandemic brings with it an acrid kind of despair, infiltrating every hour of our lives, every call we make and text we send. It’s this nauseating smog in my home, where I’ve had the privilege of working remotely, shut away from the world.

One morning, the miasma began to suffocate me. Reports said that nearly 4.4 million people were newly jobless in the U.S., some of my friends among them. Dreadful images of overcrowded hospitals appeared all over the news, while the number of those who tested positive for the virus only continued to rise. It was hitting me that people are dying because a president too concerned about his re-election chances did not acknowledge or prepare for the oncoming global health crisis.

I couldn’t breathe. I opened my windows and watched my quiet Brooklyn street. I went to my dresser. Deeply stressed, I did what I’d always done: I put on some perfume.

It’s my mother’s old favorite, a scent called “Thé Vert,” French for green tea. I bought the bottle during my first summer in New York. Overwhelmed by my magazine internship and yearning for a whiff of home, I went to a L’Occitane near Lincoln Center and sprayed the fragrance on my wrist. It’s a clean scent, floral yet piercing—Camellia sinensis with talons. My pulse steadied. My mind went from cloudy to clear. A single spritz was a vivifying hit.

A salesperson came over, eager to assure me Thé Vert was unisex. I didn’t care either way. I marched to the register with 750 milliliters of the stuff and emptied my wallet onto the counter. That evening, I ate dinner street-side (a five-dollar lamb and rice plate), as the oily halal cart aromas mingled with my new perfume.

It’s been a good investment. That was eight years ago and I still have that same bottle to this day. Some of my fragrances have turned bad over time, but Thé Vert, I think, hasn’t changed much. The green tea is still there, though now it smells peppery when it tickles my nose. Ultimately, its effect is the same: Wearing it, I inhale botanical grit, my mother’s eternal fortitude. And then, whatever anxiety I can release, I get to exhale.

L’Occitane launched Thé Vert in 1999. Bitter orange is the primary top note; the middle notes are green tea and jasmine; nutmeg, cedar, and thyme make up the base. Some reviews on the perfume site Fragrantica associate it with “a happy summer day” or “a picnic at the park.” But when I smell it, I conjure other images entirely.

To me, Thé Vert is five o’clock in the smoggy Manila morning. It’s my mother in her blazer and pencil skirt, applying a full face of makeup in the two-hour traffic jam, dropping me off at school en route to work. Thé Vert is me sobbing into my mother’s collarbone, hurt and confused by men in my family who told me to “man up.” It’s her consoling embrace, her reminders that this storm will pass once we beach upon more welcoming shores.

Thé Vert is my mother in her bedroom in Las Vegas, crying on the phone to my stepfather in the Philippines, separated from her beloved. It’s me hugging her, reminding her that we have each other as we restart our lives in this strange new country. It’s us finding solace in beautiful, simple things—in shared meals, in French perfumes, in our mutual trust and friendship.

As time wore on, my mother wore her perfume less and less, until she finally stopped. L’Occitane discontinued Thé Vert in 2013, a year after I first bought it. They replaced it with the remixed Thé Vert & Bigarade. On Fragrantica, a reviewer called the new formula “bitter and sickly,” and preferred the original Thé Vert because it was “penetrating” and “sharp.”

My mother was similar, someone who cut her own path—for herself in the Philippines; for us both in the United States. That’s the woman I try to channel whenever I put on Thé Vert. I imagine walking through a cloud of atomized courage, borrowing my mother’s conviction, her grace. The bloom of it on my skin tells me that, against all odds, all will be well.

“I’m wearing your perfume today,” I told my mother recently. (This Sunday? Last Tuesday morning?)

Daytime in Brooklyn meant nighttime in Manila, where she and my stepfather now live together. Their self-isolation began around the same time as mine. I could hear the television in their townhouse. They were watching a press briefing live on CNN.

She doesn’t wear fragrances anymore, she said, “so it’s your perfume now, anak.”

I said that it still reminds me of her. It comforts me, makes bearable the fact that I can’t be by her side in the middle of what, on the worst days, feels like the end of the world. I wish I could see you, I told her. She smiled; I could sense it over the phone.

“It’s safer that you’re not here,” she said. “But I miss you too.”

I was supposed to visit my family this spring. But between my work schedule and preparing for the publication of my book this summer, I never got around to buying a plane ticket. This procrastination did me a favor, sort of. When New York governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency on March 7, my mother told me—jokingly, I think—that God had willed my indolence.

Just as well, we agreed. Flying from the U.S. to the Philippines would have meant going through multiple international gateways, potentially contracting the coronavirus along the way, and possibly passing it on to my mother and stepfather. They’re getting on a bit—she’s in her 60s; he’s in his 70s—and the Center for Disease Control states that older adults are at higher risk for severe illnesses from COVID-19. Also, my mother is immunocompromised. This is because she has cancer.

Again, I should say. My mother was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. Treatment put her into remission by the summer of 2016; by the fall, we were visiting Rome and Paris together for the first time. Then in 2019, last summer, she phoned me with the news.

Through tears, she said, “It’s back.”

The words my brain managed to pick up were stage IV, metastasized, the bones. She would have called sooner, she explained, but she didn’t want to interrupt my work. I was at an arts residency in New Hampshire for the month, finishing my manuscript. So, under sudden pressure and running out of time, I completed the first draft of my book the next day, unsure how to celebrate, unsure if I should.

The rest of my time at the residency, I wore Thé Vert. I wore it when I went to Manila to see my mother that fall—and again over the winter holidays, when it still felt safe to fly overseas. This year, I wore it at my pre-launch book party, when we could still gather in large groups. I wore it on a big date, when it still felt safe to date—to hug hello, to sip each other’s cocktails, to kiss.

I wore Thé Vert when I woke up terrified. Have worn it throughout the pandemic thus far. Even now, as I write this essay, I wear my mother’s perfume.

I’m not sure when I’ll get to see her again. She’s doing fine, all things considered. Regarding her cancer, I can say that there’s no ticking clock—not for now at least. But there’s also no assured end to the coronavirus crisis. According to experts, it could take anywhere from two months to a year and a half before we can reclaim even a few routines of the pre-COVID-19 world.

At the rate I’m going, I’ll run out of Thé Vert by then. I’ve been putting it on every morning in self-isolation. It keeps me calm, for the most part—as have the facts that I live alone; that I can do my job online; that I take a soapy shower after every trip to the grocery and liquor store; that I have books and video games and group chats to keep me entertained.

But that miasma, it lingers. Thé Vert cuts through it on most days, but when friends ask how I’m doing, I mention my ambient unease. My longing for a world we previously took for granted, a world to which we might never return. This fear, one I’ve felt since last summer, of looming death. The Harvard Business Review named my anxiety when it published an article about the coronavirus that said, right in the headline, “That discomfort you’re feeling is grief.”

More specifically, anticipatory grief—the kind we experience when facing an unknowable future. In the case of the coronavirus, there’s an invisible enemy still mysterious to us, shattering our sense of readiness or safety. Everything is going to change, we think, but how? That’s exactly what I’ve been feeling since my mother said, “It’s back.” Her death is around the corner. We don’t know how long we have on this road, or when we’ll make that turn.

To grapple with anticipatory grief, the HBR article says, we must first acknowledge it—the terrifying days to come. Before making meaning out of loss, before mourning too fast, we must first manage the current grief with counteractive thinking. We must focus on the present. Like so: At this moment, I’m fine. I have food and a home, a job and a warm bed. I am not sick.

But my mother is sick. Already I feel the future pangs of loss; time-traveling micro doses of unbelievable hurt. We are already so far apart physically. Yet there will be a day, who knows how soon, when that gulf widens further, when she will no longer be just a 17-hour flight away. I will not be able to reach her by phone. My memories will fade and I will run out of Thé Vert—the ways I summon my mother.

I wore Thé Vert on a date so that this boy I liked could meet her, in a way. I wore it at my pre-launch book party in order to feel her presence too. I wore it in New Hampshire to celebrate with her a milestone in my writing career. All while we still can. These days, I’ve realized, I don’t wear the perfume to borrow her bravery, to emulate her. I wear it to feel her near me, to alleviate the present distance between us, the future loss I dread.

Like many others living in self-isolation, my mother and I find consolation in the little things: phone calls, video chats, the time we do have on earth. I’m getting antsy though. I told her I’ve been looking at tickets to Manila for my birthday in September, to celebrate with her and my stepfather once the pandemic is over.

“One day at a time, anak,” my mother said. “Take care of yourself first. That’s how we’ll make it through.”

She’s right. Though time differences remain and continents still drift, at least the world keeps turning. If we play our cards right as individuals and as communities in this time of certain uncertainty, there’s a future to hope for, to work towards.

I look forward to the day when I see her again in the flesh, when we embrace and hold each other. She will get a whiff of Thé Vert, still sharp and insistent after all these years, and rest easy. She’ll know that, wherever I go—or, one day, she goes—I will carry her with me always, even long after our perfume has faded into the night.

But for now, I must relish the present. At this moment, she’s fine. She has food and a home, my stepfather and a warm bed. My mother is alive.

It’s like another spritz, another vivifying hit.

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Some Deaths Are Lonelier Than Others

The coronavirus has taken away our ability to grieve collectively, forcing us to find new ways to mourn

The writer’s grandmother is pictured holding her aunt as a baby, and the writer’s mother stands next to her.)

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The coronavirus has taken away our ability to grieve collectively, forcing us to find new ways to mourn

I have been carrying around a strange guilt lately: I feel grateful that my grandmother died in November. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined myself feeling anything positive about her death, but the pandemic has granted me an acute case of hindsight—of all the luxuries we had without realizing it.

As deaths go, my grandmother’s was an ordinary enough one for an elderly woman. Her health had been declining during the nearly two decades since my grandfather’s death, and ever since she was hospitalized in early 2019, it had seemed clear that she didn’t have much time left. The end itself happened over the course of a few days, granting her children in other provinces time to travel home to be with her when she died.

Over the next few days, the rest of the family arrived in my grandmother’s small Quebec town and began preparing for the funeral. We picked the music and the readings, cooked big meals in her kitchen, and talked about her late into the night over glass after glass of wine. The service was held in our family church, whose cornerstone my grandfather had placed and where most of us grandchildren and great-grandchildren had been baptized. It was sad in the way a long-expected death is sad, one you’ve had months to grieve in anticipation.

The only moment when I felt unmoored was at the cemetery, way up in the forest at the top of Mount Royal. After we had all commented on the beautiful view, after touching her coffin one last time, after they’d lowered her into the ground and we turned to walk back to the car, I had an urge to run back and grab her out of the grave. It had been snowing for days and it was so cold outside and she was so small and now we were just going to leave her there alone while we drove back to the nice warm house and had dinner together. I hated the thought that she had to be stuck there, freezing and lonely, while I get to keep moving through life.

Now, of course, I can’t help thinking how fortunate we were that she died just before COVID-19 began in earnest. Friends who have lost family members during the pandemic tell me about watching funerals over Zoom or Facebook Live; one Twitter acquaintance described viewing her grandmother’s funeral over video chat as it took place in a parking lot half a world away. The people left living are distraught over what feels like a lack of dignity for the dead. They carry a lot of guilt about not being able to change things.

Valerie Wagemans, from Herentals, Belgium, wishes that when saw her grandmother on March 8 she had known that it was their last chance to be together. When her grandmother was hospitalized in April with what turned out to be the coronavirus, her father and his siblings had to make the heart-wrenching choice of who among them would be the sole person allowed to visit her if her case became critical. Valerie’s father, bundled up in PPE, video-chatted with his siblings from their dying mother’s bedside; that night, she slipped away in her sleep. The family were able to have a funeral, but they had to maintain two metres’ distance from each other.

“Seeing my dad greet his mom for the last time, breaking down as he walked away and not being able to hug him…it was a knife to my heart,” says Wagemans. “Afterwards, we said a few words to each other, from afar, and each got back into our own cars and drove without having that much needed time among family to try and come to terms with it.”

Wagemans knows she’s one of the lucky ones, in that her grandmother was able to have a visitor at the end and they were able to have a funeral, but that kind of luck isn’t much comfort. Like many of the people I know who are grieving pandemic deaths, she speaks of not knowing how to process the loss without the familiar customs.

“Funeral rituals have a benefit to the people who are grieving when their lives have been turned upside down,” says social work researcher Susan Cadell. “They serve a purpose of being a road map at a time when there are no directions.”

Not having that map right now is a bitter loss. Part of what people are struggling with is the fact that, in the middle of all this death, it feels like the script for how we navigate it has been taken away. What do you do when someone dies and you can’t perform the usual rites, which for many have the added complication of also being religiously significant? How do you honour someone’s life right now in a way that feels worthy of them? In what ways can we make individual deaths feel meaningful when they’re just one among so many other deaths?

There are also, Cadell says, cultural expectations surrounding our role in what happens when people we know are sick or dying. We’re accustomed to being able to sit with someone while they are sick and suffering, to comfort and bear witness as they die. Even pre-pandemic, this could be challenging; physical proximity doesn’t change the fact that the dying person is on a journey on which no one can accompany them. I think of Simone de Beauvoir writing in A Very Easy Death that even though she and her sister never left their mother’s bedside in her last days, they experienced a profound feeling of separation from her, that “each [dying person] experiences the adventure in solitude.” The coronavirus has brought many of us to the stark realization that some deaths are much lonelier than others, adding to the powerlessness and fear everyone is going through right now. It’s like that same awful sensation of walking away and leaving my grandmother deserted in her grave, only amplified exponentially.

According to psychotherapist Megan Devine, creator of the online community Refuge in Grief, these feelings are another layer of the grieving we’re experiencing right now. She tells me that coping with it can begin as simply as admitting that things are rough.

“Acknowledgement is medicine,” says Devine. “And yes, it sucks right now.”

For Devine, one of the most important functions that in-person funerals provide is the chance to share bereavement in a way that doesn’t require talking.

“Without being able to gather together, we can’t hug each other or meet in that place beyond words,” says Devine. “Touch is the bridge there. We miss that wordless place.”

In spite of that, Devine emphasizes that our current isolation and social distancing practices don’t have to preclude us from creating new meaningful ways to mark the end of a life. Her view is that there is no expiration date on when a funeral or memorial has to happen; one way we can cope with the present is by planning events for a time when it’s possible to gather in person again. She also suggests looking for ways to make online funerals or other events feel more personal. Families might all separately cook the favourite meal of a deceased person and then log on to Zoom to eat together, or make a shared Google map where they mark the places that were significant to the person who died, or take turns playing songs that remind them of the person they’ve lost. Those who are grieving can also try practicing their own private rituals; Devine says that these can be as simple as setting aside some time every morning or evening to sit with a photo of the dead person, maybe with a candle and a cup of tea. Drawing inspiration from 18th century poet William Blake, who used to have regular conversations with his dead brother, she suggests trying to talk to the person. Having these quiet touchpoints can help you stay grounded in the present.

Both Devine and Cadell emphasize that, contrary to the social messaging we receive, funerals don’t provide an ending to grief. Rituals mark an occasion and give us a structure within which to express our feelings, but they can’t solve the feelings themselves. If we’re looking forward to life (and death) returning to some version of normal as a panacea for these overwhelming emotions, we’re probably going to be disappointed. We will no doubt be working through our collective grief for many years to come. What we can draw comfort from right now is that, even though things are incredibly difficult, we’re already finding new ways to do that.

I’m still grieving my grandmother’s death, even though it happened nearly six months ago. I feel guilty about that, too, because I know that the circumstances surrounding the end of her life were so much more favourable than they would be now. How can I still be sad about such a comparatively good death when other people have much fresher, more awful deaths to mourn? But it’s not a zero sum game, and there’s still room to miss her even with everything else that’s going on.

I’m trying out Devine’s suggestion of sitting with a photograph of her; it’s on the table next to me as I type this out. In it, she’s a little girl in the backyard of her childhood house, her arms thrown around her sister and brother. She’s smiling at someone out of the frame and if I position the picture just right, I can catch her gaze. I don’t know if I’m at the point where I could have an imaginary conversation with her, but her lips are parting, as if she’s about to speak.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What’s Going to Happen to Junior, Now That His Mother Is Dead?

A Manhattan man with autism was sent to a quarantine facility after his mother had symptoms of the coronavirus and died.

Daysi Díaz, an immigrant from Honduras, worked as a seamstress and later as a home health aide.

By Joseph Goldstein

Daysi Díaz, 65, was afraid to see a doctor, despite a fever that wouldn’t go away. If she was diagnosed with the coronavirus, she might have to be hospitalized. Who would look after her son, Junior?

So Ms. Díaz stayed put in her ninth-floor apartment in a public housing project in Upper Manhattan, growing weaker. Relatives called her often to check in. During one such call in March, Ms. Díaz collapsed. In her final words, she called out for Junior. But he was in a deep sleep.

After his mother’s death, Junior, who is 31 and has a developmental disability, was hospitalized and sent to a quarantine facility in Queens.

His stutter has worsened. He has struggled to make sense of his mother’s death, wondering if she is in heaven. And he has wrestled with anxiety, said his aunt, Carmen González, who is Ms. Díaz’s sister-in-law.

“She thought she was going to live to take care of him,” Ms. González said.

The toll wrought by the coronavirus is forcing some families to confront a wrenching question years before they believed it would be necessary: If a caretaker dies, who will care for disabled adult relatives?

“As Covid-19 sweeps across our city and nation, a lot of parents are coming to the realization that they aren’t going to be here forever and they need a plan,” Jonathan Novick, an outreach manager with the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, wrote in an email.

Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities have been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus, which has torn through group homes. But the virus also poses a threat to adults with these disabilities who still live with their aging parents.

“We are going to see more and more cases like this one,” said Dominic Sisti, an assistant professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

While there’s no indication Ms. Díaz was ever tested for the coronavirus, Junior was recently diagnosed with a mild case of Covid-19, so it seems likely that his mother also died of the illness caused by the virus, Ms. González said.

Initially, that made finding a new home for Junior more difficult. But in recent days, a family friend has taken Junior in.

Junior had lived with his mother for the past decade. An immigrant from Honduras, Ms. Díaz worked as a seamstress and later as a home health aide, before injuring her back lifting a patient.

Ms. Díaz was often vague when describing her son’s disability to relatives. But his aunt, Ms. González, said she believed he was on the autism spectrum. A health care provider directly involved in Junior’s care confirmed that to be the case.

The family did not make Junior available for an interview because Ms. González said it might confuse him and leave him unsettled.

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His father was not involved in his life, according to Ms. González. Junior spent his childhood in institutions after showing aggressive behavior at age 5 or 6, she said.

“He went from one place to another,” said Ms. González, who is a retired teacher. “His mom would go everywhere he went, all the time to visit.”

He returned home around age 21, at which point Ms. Díaz became her son’s caregiver. It was often difficult. Tantrums often sent him onto the floor, where he would pound the ground with his fists. But with his mother’s help, he began to exercise some independence.

He loved to look through coupons and fliers left in lobbies, always searching for a bargain. His mother would send him out shopping, an outing that he enjoyed.

His mother’s daily worry was that he would behave in a way a stranger found inappropriate and that things would spiral out of control.

On March 21, Ms. Díaz developed a headache and then a high fever. Soon she was coughing so loudly the neighbors could hear it.

At the time, hospitals were inundated with Covid-19 patients. The city was urging sick people to stay at home, if possible. Ms. González said she received little guidance after calling 311 seeking help for her sister-in-law. “Don’t go to the emergency room,” Ms. González recalled the operator telling her.

Still, Ms. González urged her sister-in-law to try an urgent care center. But Ms. Díaz was too weak to get anywhere on her own. She wasn’t sure whether she had the flu or the coronavirus, but she was scared to find out.

“Truthfully, she was afraid of having the virus, because she didn’t want to leave her son,” Ms. González said. “What’s going to happen to him, you know?”

On the morning of March 31, Ms. Díaz was on the phone with an aunt when she began to call out for Junior. Then the phone fell to the ground. Ms. Díaz had collapsed, according to Ms. González.

An ambulance crew arrived and tried to resuscitate her but failed. . Hours later, Junior was later taken by ambulance to NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center, near his home in the Dyckman houses. There was nowhere else to take him.

Ms. González, 72, who is raising her 6-year-old grandson and also cares for an older sister, said she wanted to take Junior in, “but my hands are totally tied.”

In early April, Junior tested positive for Covid-19, though he showed only mild symptoms, Ms. González said. He spent several weeks at the John A. Cook Center in Queens, a facility that ordinarily runs programs for adults with developmental or intellectual disabilities but is now being used as a quarantine center for disabled adults with Covid-19.

He passed the time watching documentaries. In phone calls with his aunt, Junior often brought up his mother.

“My mother was a loving mother and took good care of me,” he said, according to Ms. González.

But the conversations also were unpredictable.

“Why don’t they call 911 to put out the fire in hell?” he asked his aunt once. She said she steered the conversation back to heaven, explaining that if he was good he’d end up there with his mother.

In early April, a family friend who has a son with special needs agreed to take in Junior. But Junior’s Covid-19 diagnosis led to a delay of several weeks.

Then last week, with Junior appearing healthier, he moved in with the family friend at her home in Yonkers. So far it has been a good fit, Ms. González said.

In recent phone calls with his aunt, Junior has started to grieve more openly.

“He asked me if it was OK to cry because his mom died,” Ms. González recalled last week. “I told him that it’s OK and that he did not have to hold his feelings inside.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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6 Ways To Cope With Anticipatory Grief During The Coronavirus Pandemic

By María Tomás-Keegan

You can make the best of the current situation.

It’s odd. Not much has changed for me. I’ve worked from home for over 20 years, so nothing new there. I see clients, virtually, so social distancing is no problem. No kids to home-school.

My husband and I are homebodies due to his health, so not being able to go out for fun is not a huge sacrifice. With the exception of my small business has taken a hit, I should be good, right?

Then, what are all these emotions coming up? I’ve never felt anything like this.

All at once, I’m feeling depression over the loss of many things: connection, safety, control, freedom, physical contact, a predictable future, financial security, and new clients.

Based on what I do for a living, I know all too well what comes from loss and how mental health is affected.

It’s grief — but a whole different kind for me. I’ve had my share of losses in the past — sudden ones and some that I knew were coming. Among those losses include both parents, two siblings, jobs, and friends.

Not unlike most of you. Yet, this feels different.

Anticipatory grief could describe it, which means we are grieving before we have fully experienced the loss. It’s typically associated with the impending loss of someone who is very ill—been through that one, too.

And, because there is so much uncertainty around the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, it feels as if there is no end in sight. As we think about all that is going on, we find ourselves imagining the worst outcome. It’s human nature.

Even while I’m trying to stay grounded and connected to the people who support me, there is still a pit in my stomach. Although I know in my head that this condition is temporary, the uncertainty is unsettling.

As I attempt to stay connected — with family and friends, clients, and colleagues — I hear a certain degree of dread in their voices.

Some call it fear, anxiety, and panic. It feels like pervasive negative energy that is hard to avoid.

So what can we do to make the best of this roller coaster ride of emotions?

As a life coach specializing in transitions, I learn from the experts.

One of my go-to resources is David Kessler, one of the foremost experts on grief. His recent interview in the Harvard Business Review helped me to sort this out for myself.

When asked what people can do to cope with the grief we’re feeling, Mr. Kessler said:

“Understanding the stages of grief is a start. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map, but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world.”

There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: “This virus won’t affect us.”

There’s anger: “You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities.”

There’s bargaining: “Okay, if I social distance for two weeks, everything will be better, right?”

There’s sadness: “I don’t know when this will end.”

And finally, there’s acceptance: “This is happening. I have to figure out how to proceed.”

Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance: “I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.”

What stage do you recognize as yours?

I’m bouncing between bargaining and sadness and acceptance, with a brief visit back to denial and anger. Kessler is right — it’s not a linear journey through grief.

With the stage identified, how do you manage this thing called anticipatory grief?

There are 6 ways to cope with anticipatory grief during this pandemic.

1. Allow your emotions to flow.

Kessler says, “Emotions need motion” and I cannot agree more. Think about what happens when you stuff down anger and you don’t let it out in a healthy way.

You likely feel a lump in your throat or a knot in your stomach. Your hands may shake. And you may develop a massive headache

That’s an emotion that has nowhere to go. It can be so powerful that you lose yourself in it. It’s vital to take steps to alleviate some of the pressure so you can let the feelings go.

First, acknowledge your feelings and give them a name. If it’s grief, call it grief. Anxiety. Fear. Whatever it is, attach the label to it.

Then, find ways to work through each one, with the ultimate goal of releasing the emotion from your body. The relief you feel will be tangible and allow you to move forward from here.

This can be an uncomfortable exercise. But, when you talk it out with someone you trust, it will become easier. However, if you ignore this step, the rest of these suggestions might not be very effective.

2. Notice what you’re thinking.

If you’re watching too much of the media reports, you may be spending more time in the doom and gloom department than you want.

Consequently, your thoughts may take you down a rabbit hole from which it’s difficult to climb out.

When you notice this happening, make a conscious choice to change the negative thought into one that feels better to you.

For example, instead of thinking, this will never end, you might choose to think, this is just temporary, and we’re going to be okay.

3. Be in the moment.

Anticipatory grief happens when your mind projects into the future and imagines the worst possible scenarios.

When you find yourself doing that, it helps to bring yourself back into the present.

In the here and now, what you imagined hasn’t happened. Take a look around and take note of where you are.

I’m sitting in my living room. The sun is shining, there is a slight breeze, and my dog is lying at my feet. I’m okay.

Then, observe how you are breathing. Slow it down. Take in some deep breaths and exhale slowly.

Being in the present can bring about a sense of calm. You can choose to practice this at any time your mind wanders into the ‘badlands’.

4. Control what you can.

The loss of control can be the most unsettling feeling of all. Along with that loss comes a sense of insecurity, anxiety, and fear that you have no power to influence the outcome of the situation.

But, you do.

Minding your mind and staying present will help you feel more control in this uncertain world.

A simple way to feel more in control is to make a list of all the things that are in your power to influence.

For instance, your list might look like this:

  • The time I go to bed and wake up
  • The people I hang with to uplift me
  • What I choose to think about
  • My priorities
  • What I talk about
  • How often I reach out to connect with my family & friends
  • How kind and compassionate I am
  • How much I laugh

Write your list and refer to it every time the powerful emotions come up, which makes you feel totally out of control.

5. Be kind and compassionate, reserve judgment, and bring no harm.

The coronavirus pandemic has affected the entire world. It is an unprecedented time where we can honestly say, “We are all in this together.”

No one is immune and we are all doing the best we can — anticipatory grief and all.

Given these facts, there has never been a better time to live by the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.

I want people to be kind to me, compassionate for my situation. And I don’t want anyone to judge me for doing something right for me, even though it may not be what they would do. As long as I bring no harm, I’m good. And so are you.

Each one of us deals with the profound emotional toll in different ways. It’s the perfect time to allow kindness and compassion to emerge.

Understanding and reserving judgment are the best tools we have to help each other as we move through the loss, grief, and worry that permeates our world today.

6. Find the silver lining.

When things feel most grim, it helps to look for the good.

In my case, the neighborhood has come together to help each other.

If someone is making a run for groceries, we all get a text to ask for our shopping list. One person goes to the store and replenishes the cupboards of many.

Are you spending more time with your family at home? Do you share your deepest worries and concerns with your partner more than you did before?

What has changed for the better because you are working from home, schooling your children, or being more conscious of your sanitary habits?

One friend of mine made me laugh when she said she has greater respect for her kid’s teachers and what they go through every day. And, she continued, she only has two at home, not a classroom-full!

For that, she is grateful. She said her silver lining is that this won’t last forever and she can send her kids back to school one day soon.

What have you noticed more of, get to do now, or enjoy better because of your situation? Focus on those.

One of the guests on my podcast went through great adversity and developed a motto that helped her when things got dark.

She now uses it to help her feel better during this pandemic. She says, “The plus side is…” What’s your plus side?

Lastly, don’t try to do this alone. Isolation is not your friend. Connection is.

Whatever the powerful emotions you feel, don’t keep them to yourself. Find someone you trust and get it all off your chest. The worry you feel about what you can’t know is the same worry everyone else is feeling.

Anticipatory grief and all the accompanying emotions can build up like a pressure cooker.

Staying connected with your people will help you release the pressure and take positive steps to keep moving forward in the best ways you can.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Her greatest fear was dying alone

— two days after she caught coronavirus, she did

Britt Patrick, right, said her mother Jennifer Patrick was a joyful person who loved spending time with friends and family. Jennifer Patrick died of COVID-19 in a Calgary nursing home on April 19.

Nursing professor says everyone should have the chance to say a deathbed goodbye

By Sarah Rieger

Jennifer Patrick was terrified of dying alone.

The 65-year-old was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis nearly two years ago. She relied on progressively higher and higher concentrations of oxygen and a few months ago was moved to a Calgary nursing home.

Since the diagnosis, Britt Patrick said her mom just kept repeating her fear — “I don’t want to die alone.”

But two days after she contracted COVID-19 that’s exactly what happened.

On April 19, the 65-year-old from Airdrie, Alta., was having a panic attack, gasping for air. She hadn’t seen a friend or family member in days.

It was her husband’s birthday. They’d spent the last 41 years together but hadn’t seen each other since the Calgary home, Extendicare Hillcrest, was locked down to visitors. Her daughter and grandchildren were two provinces away.

Her nurse, who was sitting by her bedside, left the room to get morphine to ease her panicked gasps for air. When the nurse returned, Jennifer Patrick was gone.

“It was very, very surreal,” Britt Patrick said.

“I feel like maybe my dad should have been allowed in with proper protection just to say goodbye.”

No chance to say goodbye

Patrick said her mom’s COVID-19 diagnosis didn’t come as a shock. The Winnipeg resident knew Calgary was experiencing high numbers of COVID-19 cases, and said she had an ominous feeling, knowing her mom already had a serious respiratory illness.

But the speed of her mom’s death, without a chance to say goodbye, left her reeling.

She doesn’t even remember what they talked about during their last phone call — the oxygen deprivation had increasingly made talking on the phone difficult for her mom.

“That’s frustrating and that’s hard,” she said.

“I know I ended up missing a phone call with her. I had been trying to get a hold of her for quite a while and I finally got a phone call back. I was just getting out the door and I didn’t have time to answer it and I wish I’d taken that two minutes to take that conversation.”

She also doesn’t know what to tell her three children.

“They’re struggling with it, they’re asking, ‘When can we go out there? Are we going to the funeral?’ They’re asking very obvious questions for children that I can’t answer and that’s frustrating, to not be able to let them know when we can visit Grampy, when we can do these things,” she said.

Dying alone all too common during pandemic

While Patrick may feel alone in her grief, tens of thousands of families globally are facing the same harsh reality — forced to say goodbye through a video call or being deprived of even that small connection, due to precautions in place or personal safety decisions made to avoid spreading the infectious disease.

University of Alberta nursing professor Donna Wilson studies end-of-life care, bereavement and what it means to have a good death.

She said while initially many of us were taken by surprise by the pandemic, now that it has been the reality for months, it’s time to find better ways to let people say goodbye.

“There has to be a way around this,” Wilson said.

If a family member thinks it wasn’t a good death … they may have seriously complicated grief.
– Donna Wilson, University of Alberta nursing professor

Wilson said the deathbed goodbye — where loved ones gather around a dying person’s bedside to make amends, and express sentiments that may have previously gone unsaid — is a centuries-old custom for a reason.

“People don’t want to be alone, they want to be surrounded by their family members, the people that really mean something to them… it’s really important because people have the opportunity to say something to the dying person that maybe they never said before.”

She said international research has shown that a good death, which is somewhat expected, largely free from suffering, and in accordance with a patient or their family’s wishes, is vital to the grieving process for those left behind.

“If the family member thinks it wasn’t a good death … they grieve harder and longer and they may never get over the death, they may have seriously complicated grief,” she said.

The families of people who died after getting COVID-19 are sharing the stories of their loved ones to encourage others to do what they can to prevent further spread of the coronavirus. 2:05

That’s the situation Britt Patrick finds herself in.

“You have people who are passing away afraid and alone, why can’t we at least set something up to allow people to say goodbye safely?” she said.

Michael Bittante, the regional director for Extendicare, said while Jennifer Patrick’s family was contacted and informed of her condition, end-of-life visits are not always feasible.

“We continue to provide end-of-life visitation with families when possible, using personal protective equipment and infection control measures. Unfortunately, this is not always possible for a number of reasons, including the progression of a resident’s illness,” he said.

CBC News reached out to Extendicare to clarify the timeline as to when residents are allowed end-of-life visitors, and the company reiterated that it is following provincial directives.

Donna Wilson said it’s important for the government or health officials to step in, as they did to limit visitors to nursing homes, to ensure end-of-life visits happen.

“We’re looking at a lot of people that are going to be really severely damaged if they’re blocked from the deathbed,” she said.

Wilson suggested strategies like bringing in retired nurses to facilitate visits and assist visitors with donning protective equipment, or arranging for visits to be held in private rooms near the entrances of buildings or even in ambulances, that can be cleaned after each visit.

“If you can get a nurse in and out of a hospital safely … you can bring a relative in and out safely.”

Some end-of-life policies were applied too strictly

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, said Wednesday that she knows the protective measures in place at long-term care facilities are causing many residents to feel increasingly isolated and said some end-of-life visitation policies were being applied more strictly than intended.

“There have been some interpretations where some believed the intention of the order was [to only allow visits] in the last few hours of life … it’s very difficult to arrange for visits in that very narrow window,” she said.

“We expect that individuals who are dying must have the opportunity to have their loved ones at their side.”

She said up to two visitors can be allowed to see those estimated to be two weeks away from death, as long as they maintain two metres of physical distance.

While that update doesn’t change anything for Britt Patrick, she’s learned one thing in her grief she wants to share.

“Just take every chance to connect with your loved ones.”

There were 503 cases of COVID-19 in nursing homes across Alberta as of Wednesday.

In the two weeks since an outbreak was declared at Jennifer Patrick’s nursing home, eight residents have died, and 19 residents and 10 staff members have contracted COVID-19.

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