Category: Grief

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Grief in a Pandemic:

Holding a Dying Mother’s Hand With a Latex Glove

by Deborah Bloom and Nathan Layne

Doug Briggs put on a surgical gown, blue gloves and a powered respirator with a hood. He headed into the hospital room to see his mother – to tell her goodbye.

Briggs took his phone, sealed in a Ziplock bag, into the hospital room and cued up his mother’s favorite songs. He put it next to her ear and noticed her wiggle, ever so slightly, to the music.

“She knew I was there,” Briggs recalled, smiling.

Between songs by Barbara Streisand and the Beatles, Briggs conference-called his aunts to let them speak to their sister one last time. “I love you, and I’m sorry I’m not there with you. I hope the medicine they’re giving you is making you more comfortable,” said Meri Dreyfuss, one of her sisters.

Somewhere between “Stand by Me” and “Here, There, and Everywhere,” Barbara Dreyfuss passed away – her hand in her son’s, clad in latex. It would be two days before doctors confirmed that she had succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Dreyfuss, 75, was the eighth U.S. patient to die in a pandemic that has now killed more than 1,200 nationally and nearly 25,000 worldwide. She was among three dozen deaths linked to the Life Care nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, the site of one of the first and deadliest U.S. outbreaks. (For interactive graphics tracking coronavirus in the United States and worldwide, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2Uj9ry0 and https://tmsnrt.rs/3akNaFr )

Dreyfuss’s final hours illustrate the heartrending choices now facing families who are forced to strike a balance between staying safe and comforting their sick or dying loved ones. Some have been cut off from all contact with parents or spouses who die in isolation, while others have strained to provide comfort or to say their final goodbyes through windows or over the phone.

Just three days before his mother died, Briggs had been making weekend plans with her. Now, in his grief, he found himself glued to news reports and frustrated by the mixed messages and slow response from local, state and federal officials.

“You find out all these things, of what they knew when,” Briggs said.

Officials from Life Care Centers of America have said the facility responded the best it could to one of the worst crises ever to hit an eldercare facility, with many staffers stretched to the brink as others were sidelined with symptoms of the virus. As the first U.S. site hit with a major outbreak, the center had few protocols for a response and little help from the outside amid national shortages of test kits and other supplies.

‘NOT FEELING TOO GOOD’

A flower child of the 1960’s, Dreyfuss lived a life characterized by art and activism. After marrying her high school sweetheart and giving birth to their son, she pursued a degree in women’s studies at Cal State Long Beach, where she marched for women’s equality and abortion rights.

Furious over President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of former president Richard Nixon in 1974, Dreyfuss took to her typewriter and penned an angry letter to Ford. “Today is my son’s 9th birthday,” she wrote of a young Briggs. “I do not feel like celebrating.”

By the time she arrived at the Life Care Center in May 2019, years of health issues had dimmed some of that spark, her son said. Fibromyalgia and plantar fasciitis restricted her to a walker or a wheelchair, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease required her to have a constant flow of oxygen.

When her son visited on Feb. 25, he brought a grocery bag of her favorites, including diet A&W root beer. She awoke from a nap and smiled at him, but hinted at her discomfort.

“Hi Doug,” she said. “I’m not feeling too good.”

Still, Dreyfuss talked about an upcoming visit with her sisters – the movies she wanted to see, the restaurants she wanted to try. The mother and son then had only a vague awareness of the deadly virus then ravaging China.

In hindsight, Briggs realized he had witnessed the first signs of her distress. His mother was using more oxygen than usual, her breathing was more strained.

At the time, staff at the nursing home believed they were handling a flu outbreak and were unaware the coronavirus had started to take hold, a spokesman has said.

‘A TINY FOOTNOTE’

Two days later, Briggs dropped by to see his mom. She felt congested, and staff were going to X-ray her lungs for fluid. Briggs, 54, still saw no red flags, and continued to discuss weekend plans with his mother.

“I hope we can finally watch that new Mr. Rogers movie,” she told him, referring to the film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Briggs hugged his mom before she was wheeled to the imaging room and drove for a quick meal. Soon after, he received a call from the nursing home. His mother was experiencing respiratory failure. She was on her way to the hospital. Doug rushed to nearby EvergreenHealth Medical Center. By then, she was unresponsive.

At the time, there were 59 U.S. cases of coronavirus, a number that has since soared to more than 85,000.

After hearing of her sister’s sudden hospitalization, Meri Dreyfuss remembered an earlier voicemail from Barbara: her distant voice, groaning for 30 seconds. When she had first heard it, she assumed Dreyfuss had called by accident, but now she realized her sister was in pain. “It haunts me that I didn’t pick up the phone,” she said.

Briggs spent close to 10 hours the next day in his mom’s hospital room. He wore a medical mask and anxiously watched her vital signs – especially the line tracking her oxygen saturation.

On his way out the door, a doctor took him aside to say they were testing her for the coronavirus. He remembered the difficulty reconciling the outbreak taking place on television – far away, in China – with what was happening in his mother’s hospital room.

In the Bay Area, Meri and Hillary Dreyfuss were packing their suitcases on Feb. 28 when Briggs telephoned. After the call, they decided that visiting their sister would pose too much danger of infection.

“I realized there was no way we were going to get on a plane at that point, because we couldn’t see her,” said the middle sister, Hillary. “And now, it seemed that we shouldn’t be seeing Doug, either.”

They canceled their flights. On Saturday, Feb. 29, Briggs learned his mother’s condition was deteriorating. Tough decisions loomed. Briggs and his aunts decided to prioritize making her comfortable over keeping her alive. Doctors gave her morphine to relax the heaviness in her lungs.

She died the next day.

Having emerged from a two-week quarantine, Briggs will soon retrieve his mother’s cremated remains. The family has been struggling with how to memorialize her life in such chaotic times.

“All the things that one would want to happen in the normal mourning process have been subsumed by this larger crisis,” said Hillary Dreyfuss. “It’s almost as though her death has become a tiny footnote in what’s going on.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A Daughter Learns in Voicemails That Coronavirus Has Killed Her Mother

by Tim Reid

Debbie de los Angeles woke up on March 3 to two voicemails from nurses at the Seattle-area care home that housed her 85-year-old mother, Twilla Morin.

In the first one, left at 4:15 a.m., a nurse asked a troubling question – whether the “do not resuscitate” instructions for her mother’s end-of-life care were still in force.

“We anticipate that she, too, has coronavirus, and she’s running a fever of 104,” the woman on the recording said. “We do not anticipate her fighting, so we just want to make sure that your goal of care would be just to keep her here and comfortable.”

The nursing home in Kirkland, Washington was dealing with the beginnings of an outbreak that has since been linked to more than 30 deaths. De los Angeles had not yet fully grasped the grave threat; she comforted herself with the thought that her mother had made it through flu outbreaks at the center before.

Then she took in the next voicemail, left three hours after the first by a different nurse.

“Hi Debbie, my name is Chelsey … I need to talk to you about your Mom if you could give us a call. Her condition is declining, so if you can call us soon as possible that would be great. Thanks. Bye.”

De los Angeles called the home immediately. Her mom was comfortable, she was told. She did not change the “do not resuscitate” instruction. She wanted to visit, but held off: She is 65, and her husband Bob is 67; both have underlying medical conditions that pose serious risks if they contract coronavirus. She thought they had more time to find the best way to comfort her mother in what might be her final hours.

At 3 a.m. the next morning, Wednesday, March 4, de los Angeles woke up and reached for her phone. Life Care Center had called – leaving another voice message just a few minutes earlier, at 2:39 a.m.

“I know it’s early in the morning but Twilla did pass away at 2:10 because of the unique situation,” the nurse said. “The remains will be picked up from the coroner’s office. They’ve got your contact.”

The “unique situation” has of course become tragically common worldwide, as thousands of families have been separated from their loved ones in the last days before they died in isolation, often after deteriorating quickly. The three voicemails – eerily routine and matter-of-fact – would be de los Angeles’ final connection to her mother. She had gone from knowing relatively little about the threat of COVID-19 to becoming a bereaved daughter in the span of one day.

The hurried voicemails with such sensitive information were one sign of the chaos inside the facility at the time, as nurses worked feverishly to contain the outbreak while residents died from a virus that was just hitting the United States. One of the nurses who called de los Angeles, Chelsey Earnest, had been director of nursing at another Life Care facility and volunteered to come to Kirkland to care for patients through the outbreak. She never expected the disease would cause dozens of deaths and the mass infection of patients and staff.

Earnest worked the night shift, when patients with the disease seemed to struggle the most, and many, like Morin, succumbed to the disease. Infected patients developed a redness in and around their eyes. The center’s phones rang constantly as worried families called for updates. About a third of the center’s 180 staff members started showing symptoms of the disease; the rest started a triage operation.

“There were no protocols,” said Life Care spokesman Tim Killian, as nurses found themselves thrust into a situation more dire than any faced by an elderly care facility “in the history of this country.”

The center’s nurses, he said, would not normally leave such sensitive information about dying relatives in voicemails, but they had little time to do anything else – and did not want anyone to hear about a loved one’s condition in the news before the center could inform them. Outside the home, journalists and family members gathered for the latest scraps of information on the home’s fight against the virus. Many relatives, barred from going inside for safety reasons, stood outside the windows of their loved ones’ rooms, looking at them through the glass as they conversed over the phone.

Leaving the emergency voicemails, Killian said, made “the best of a difficult situation.”

From the outside, the messages appear abrupt and impersonal, but may well have been the best or only way to properly notify families in such a crisis, said Ruth Faden, professor of biomedical ethics at John Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics. While medical professionals should normally aim to impart such urgent information in person, the circumstances – an overwhelmed staff, dealing with dozens of dying patients – likely made that impossible, she said.

“The way to find out is difficult, always,” Faden said. “What people remember is how much the nurse cared about the person.”

When de Los Angeles heard of her mother’s death in one of those voicemails, she immediately called one of the nurses back, looking for any bits of information about her mother’s final hours. The nurse sounded upset.

“She told me my Mom was one of her favorite people there; she was going to miss seeing my Mom going up and down the hallway in her wheelchair,” de los Angeles said.

They had given her mother morphine and Ativan to keep her calm and comfortable, the nurse told her.

“My Mom was asleep, and then she just went to sleep permanently,” de los Angeles said.

De los Angeles, an only child, aches over not having spoken to her mother before she died. Morin had been a bookkeeper for several companies. De los Angeles fondly remembers doing household chores with her mother on Saturday mornings, then going to the local mall or to Woolworth’s for lunch.

The separation continued even after her mother’s death. De los Angeles telephoned the crematorium where her mother had been taken, as Morin had arranged years earlier, to ask if she could view the body.

“Absolutely not,” the woman told her, out of concern de los Angeles could be infected.

Morin had been tested for coronavirus shortly after she died, on March 4. The results confirmed her coronavirus infection a week later. Soon afterwards, she was cremated.

“We picked up her ashes on Saturday,” she said. “I never saw or spoke to mom. It’s put off the closure.”

It’s also put off the funeral. De los Angeles had planned the ceremony for April 4 – the birthday of her father, who died ten years ago. Her ashes would be placed next to his. But the service will have to wait because Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, has banned gatherings of 10 people or more.

In the meantime, de los Angeles has worked to make sure her mother’s death certificate records her as a causality of the pandemic. The doctor who signed it did not have confirmed test results showing a COVID-19 infection at the time of her death, de los Angeles said, and listed the cause as “a viral illness, coronary artery disease and a respiratory disorder.” But the doctor has since moved to include coronavirus as a cause, at de los Angeles’ request.

As she waits for the funeral, de los Angeles has put the urn holding her mother’s ashes behind some flowers on the mantle in her living room. She says she can’t bear to look at it.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Grieving the Death of a Pet

Emotions are very real as pet owners come to terms with a difficult loss

By Chris Haws

At the pet loss support groups I conduct at the VCA Southpaws Veterinary Center in Fairfax, Va., I often hear from attendees that they encounter sentiments like this as they grieve a beloved animal companion: “He was only a dog, it’s not as if a real person died.” “You knew the day would come, cats don’t live forever.” “You can always get another pet — move on.”

Generally, such insensitive and unhelpful statements are made by people who have not known the unique, enriching and profound nature of the relationship we have with our pets.

“They just don’t get it,” said Jennifer, the grieving owner of a Miniature Schnauzer.

“And that’s their misfortune,” added Alice, her neighbor at the table and a former cat owner.

The Burden of Disenfranchised Grief

They were both right, and in more ways than you might at first imagine.

Numerous studies have shown that people enjoy a wide range of positive emotional benefits from their pets; the Comfort from Companion Animals Scale (CCAS) lists over a dozen, including companionship, pleasure, play, laughter, constancy, something to love, comfort, feeling loved, responsibility, feeling needed, trust, safety and exercise. Pet owners also tend to live longer than non-pet owners and report fewer visits to physicians, psychiatrists and therapists.

So why the disconnect when a person is grieving over the loss of a pet? Part of the answer lies in the fact that society at large doesn’t always cope very well with certain types of grief.  People aren’t sure what to say or how to behave. Death is never a comfortable topic, but when that death involves “socially delicate” circumstances such as suicide, drug overdose or any other loss that cannot be easily acknowledged, or publicly mourned, it can provoke what is described as “disenfranchised grief”.

And that’s what can occur when someone loses a pet.

Lizzy, the owner of Petra (a recently euthanized 13-year-old Boxer/Bloodhound mix), is a busy wife and mother who works full-time. Of her family, and her grief, she remarked: “They don’t want me to cry in front of them, and no one will talk about my pain.”

It’s a sentiment that is frequently expressed: “I can’t stop crying. My husband gets angry with me. I know he’s sad too, but he just won’t show it,” noted Alice, grieving the loss of the couple’s treasured cat.

And, of course, the additional, unwelcome experience of disenfranchisement only makes an already sad situation worse, as Jennifer observed: “Everybody has moved on like it was just yesterday’s news. I’m not expecting everybody to feel as I do, but to be so utterly deserted has been tough. I was literally told that I would just have to get over it. Just take twelve and a half years and move on … sure, I’ll get right on that.”

A Painful Loss After a Pet Is Gone

The point is that pet loss generates a degree of grief that can be every bit as acute as human loss. Some go even further. “These have been the worst days of my life. For me, this is worse than losing people,” wrote Karen, a grieving Pomeranian owner.

She is not alone. Many of the attendees at my pet loss support group sessions have expressed the same view. Grief from pet loss hurts. A lot.

Grief from pet loss is also an equal opportunity emotion. Our session attendees have included high ranking military officers, diplomats, corporate executives and professional artists. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. There are a lot of us pet owners around.

Sixty-seven percent of all U.S. households, or about 85 million families, own a pet. Some 73 % of those families own one or more dogs (89.7 million) and 49% own one or more cats (94.2 million).

And the sad — and significant — fact is that no pet lives forever. The mean age of death for dogs of all breeds is just over 11 years; curiously, the larger breeds die much younger than the small breeds, and scientists aren’t quite sure why. For house cats, the mean age at death is just over 15 years.

Pet ownership is almost certain to lead to loss, at some point in time. Most of us understand that reality, although we don’t like to dwell too much on it.

The relatively short lifespan of a pet also brings its own unique challenge. The relationship that we have with our animal companions is beyond special — a two-way dependency that is based on an unspoken agreement that we will care for each other with no questions asked. But at the end of a pet’s life, that understanding can be tested in a way that has yet to present itself in the realm of human mortality: euthanasia.

A large animal hospital such as VCA South Paws “puts down” over 20 animals a week, but only after extensive veterinary medical review and never without the full agreement and participation of the owner. Nevertheless, many of the attendees at the pet loss support sessions are still wracked with guilt about the decision they made to end their companion’s life. Might he have recovered? What else could have been done for her? Had they been too hasty?

If it’s any consolation, in every case I’ve encountered, not only had the time truly come to end the animal’s pain or suffering, but in many cases the creature seemed ready and willing to stop battling on as well.

“He was ready to go,” observed Sue, the owner of a Chocolate Labrador. “She was suffering and I needed to help my best friend,” remembers Lizzy, the Boxer/Bloodhound owner.“There was nothing more anyone could do” agreed John, the heartbroken owner of a fourteen-year-old Yorkie.

Grieving in a Safe Space

That unfamiliar blend of resignation, relief and heartache is a difficult one to process and it takes a while for people to reconcile all those internal conflicts. That’s where grief support groups can play an important role. It really helps someone who is bursting with questions and doubts, on top of their inevitable grief, to hear others express similar feelings and emotions.

As one newcomer to the group remarked: “I was astonished to hear her talk about the same feelings I have and the same behaviors I’m doing. Someone I’ve never met, not in my age group, probably with a completely different life than mine, doing the same things and feeling the exact same way as myself.”

Another fellow griever agreed: “I was surprised that my reaction is normal. It’s nice to speak to others that recognize those dark moments.”

As you might imagine, there is a lot of sympathetic nodding and wry smiles of recognition at these meetings. We also go through a lot of tissues. And that’s perfectly OK, too.

Like any grief counseling session, the participants are encouraged to talk openly about their feelings and express whatever emotion overwhelms them. Pet loss support groups are resolutely safe places … places where nobody is allowed to feel disenfranchised.

And there’s also a lot of laughter, as we hear about how Stan the cat defended his place on the family couch or how Petra the dog had a habit of herding the young children towards the meal table at supper time. These are precious memories, shared with people who understand.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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We’re used to grieving together.

What happens when we can’t?

Coffins accumulate in a tent at the Bergamo hospital in Lombardy, Italy, where funerals are now banned.

By Meghan O’Rourke

One recent night, as my concern mounted about the spreading coronavirus, my partner observed in reassurance: “It’s not like it’s the Spanish flu. People are still able to hold funerals.” On the very next day came the news that Italy had banned civil and religious ceremonies, including funerals — meaning people can no longer come together to grieve the dead. With coronavirus cases exponentially rising in the United States, this problem may soon be ours, too: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that families hold “virtual” funerals, streamed online, to limit the numbers in attendance.

Most of us have adjusted quickly, or tried to, amid the radical changes that constitute our new normal. But this possibility — that the newly bereaved may be unable to hold funerals — is a gutting reality we may never make peace with. Within it lies the trauma of the pandemic: This global public health crisis brings with it a surge of infection-driven death and chaos (temporary, we hope) that few of us have ever witnessed. There’s a lot we can numb ourselves to in order to survive. But I’m not sure we can numb ourselves to the idea that we can no longer come together for funeral rites — behavior that defines us as human.

Mourning rituals across cultures show that we need others to grieve with us. After my mother died in late 2008, I was struck by how these rituals, which had once seemed rote to me, suddenly became important. I craved social recognition that I was no longer myself, exactly, that the loss had made me a new person. The bereaved need witnesses to help them begin to separate themselves from the dead, to adjust to the sudden, shocking absence of their beloveds. Most cultures have a scripted set of customs: rituals tied to the preparation of the body; rules about the period before the burial. At an Irish wake, mourners gather to visit the body of the deceased, saying their goodbyes and often telling celebratory, even raucous stories in honor of the life now gone. In Jewish culture, mourners sit shiva typically for seven days, supporting those who were closest to the dead person. In many such rituals, visitors are meant to take their cue from the primary mourners — looking at the floor if the widow was somber, talking if she wanted to talk. In the Muslim tradition, the body is buried as soon as possible, but visits of comfort happen afterward (again, it is believed that social encounters help with grief), as well as a 40-day mourning period, in which the community is encouraged to send flowers and food to the bereaved. To support mourners, many traditions feature more than one ritual over the course of a year or two at specific times, including, in Judaism, the yahrzeit observance, commemorating the anniversary of a death. Everywhere, food is welcome and passed around: “a small, good thing,” as Raymond Carver put it in a short story about sharing fresh bread after an unthinkable loss.

The coronavirus pandemic is changing us in ways we can’t imagine yet. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the dead exert power over us long after they are gone. All the more so when the circumstances of loss are traumatic, as they are now in northern Italy, where the hospital system is overwhelmed and near breaking — and as they may soon be in the United States. In “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” the historian Drew Gilpin Faust points out that the mass casualties in that war “transformed the American nation as well as the hundreds of thousands of individuals directly affected by loss.” Americans began referring to the “ordinary death” that existed before the war, distinct from the extraordinary deaths during it. Surrounded by death, Americans embraced ideas that made it seem less of an irrevocable loss: The first national Spiritualist conference was held in 1864 in Chicago, the idea that it was possible to communicate with the dead having grown more popular during the war years. Some modern funeral practices — embalming, for example — were born of an emotional need then: Families wanted to see the bodies of their loved ones, and embalming helped slow their decomposition, allowing them to be shipped home on slow trains.

Through mourning, we insist that erasure isn’t complete. We honor what was and give shape to the fact that — through our loss, our love — the person who is gone still exists in our minds. Our disposal of our dead distinguishes us from animals. As the scholar Robert Pogue Harrison writes in “The Dominion of the Dead,” “Humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead, but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories.” When we don’t do it, we have a sense of deep wrong. Think of the lengths to which we go to recover the bodies of fallen soldiers. In 1993, for example, the American ambassador to Somalia negotiated with clan leaders in Mogadishu to bring home the bodies of the helicopter crewmen and Special Ops soldiers who had been dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. In this current crisis, it’s not as if we won’t be burying our dead, but many people are dying alone in hospitals, unable to say goodbye to their loved ones, and even in the days after, an essential social element is missing. Something in us, at the core of our humanity, wants to elegize, to remember — and to do it together.

The science of mourning is hard to pin down, as one might expect with such a complex human process, but studies suggest that rituals do help the bereaved: They bring some immediate relief to acute grief, and they establish formal avenues of coping and social support. Holding a funeral, saying goodbye to a loved one’s body, marks the rift between life and death, the rending of the universe we feel. To bury, Harrison writes, is not literally or merely to put in the earth (humans also have cremation, and sky burial, and more), but “in a broader sense it means to store, preserve, and put the past on hold.”

So what happens to us now, in a moment that presents these challenges? As during the Civil War, we face a bright line between the ordinary past and the extraordinary present, a before and a now whose full ramifications — emotional, economic, psychological and national — we cannot begin to understand. We hardly know what now is; we won’t until the worst is over. Along the way, we will surely find alternate ways to grieve, watching our funerals on the blue light of our screens, distant but not isolated, trying to be together while apart. The challenge is to find meaning in the chaos — to find a story we can hold onto, even in the stark absence of a reassuring ending to this pandemic in sight.

The coronavirus pandemic will be understood by its cost in lives, but also by its economic, social and cultural costs, by how it forces us to reconceive ourselves and our humanity. This is yet another reason to push to “flatten the curve,” as epidemiologists put it: so we are not forced into such isolation that most of us are unable to mourn together.

My father died suddenly in a hospital two years ago, on March 9, from a case of pneumonia that turned into sepsis and caused further complications. The two weeks when his body was fighting sepsis were disorienting, timeless, traumatic, full of beeping machines and sunless rooms. His sudden turn for the worse came while he was with strangers; we never said goodbye. But his doctor was kind enough to let us go into the operating room where a team had tried to save his life: restarting his heart, ventilating him and more. When we saw his body, it looked small and alone, heartbreakingly so. But at least I have an image to hold on to, had a chance to touch his hand and whisper our love, the love that underpins grief and drives the living to mourn, through ritual and memory, the gulf between us and those who have gone. We know what is by marking the shape of what is lost; we do that by saying goodbye, together.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Offering Sympathy From a Distance in the Time of Coronavirus

When a friend is grieving a loss, here are ways to provide support

By Margie Zable Fisher

When my good friend, Nikki, told me a few days ago that her father had just passed away from natural causes, my first reaction was to offer sympathy. Then I asked, “What are the funeral arrangements?”

Her answer: “I’m not sure. We will have a memorial service, but we don’t know when. This pandemic is kind of getting in the way.”

Well, yes, it is.

Nikki and I are part of a group of friends who met playing tennis over 20 years ago. We’ve celebrated and helped each other over the years, through marriages, births, divorces and deaths.

But after Nikki’s response, I was stumped. How was I going to support her through the grieving process, when there was no memorial and when we were all supposed to be practicing “social distancing?” I reached out to experts to get some ideas.

The New Rules of Gathering

David Kessler, a Los Angeles-based authority on grief and founder of Grief.com, is in a similar situation. Someone he knows recently died. “This is a strange new world of grief,” he says. “If we can’t gather for a funeral, mourning gets very complicated.”

In the blink of an eye, the world’s burial rituals — which have traditionally helped people through the grieving process — have changed. Italy has banned traditional funeral services. Countries around the world (including the U.S.) have suggested limits on the amount of people attending services.

People over 60 may have the toughest time attending funerals of family members or friends. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that those at a serious risk of COVID-19 avoid gatherings of 10 or more, and older people are at highest risk. Some funeral directors, including Virginia Kerr Zoller, co-owner of Kerr Brothers Funeral Homes in Lexington, Ky., are already suggesting that people’s older relatives stay home, according to a recent article in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

James Olson, funeral director of Olson Funeral Home and Cremation Service in Sheboygan, Wis., and a spokesperson for the National Funeral Directors Association, notes that Wisconsin’s governor declared that no gathering be larger than 10 people. This seems to be the most common suggestion around the country. But, as Olson notes, this could change daily or even hourly.

Matt Levinson, president of Sol Levinson and Bros. Funeral Home, serving the Jewish community in Baltimore, says they are still conducting burials quickly (as commanded by Jewish law), but are recommending that only the immediate family of 10 people or less attend. The funeral home is also offering the option to conduct the memorial service at a later date.

Levinson and his team are offering comfort the best way they can during this time — by alleviating some of the worry of gathering.

“Funeral arrangements are made over the phone, chairs are continually sanitized and spaced farther apart at the cemetery, and gloves are used for people who want to use a shovel to place earth in the grave,” he says.

Levinson also notes that he is working hard to keep his staff healthy. He has them working in shifts, not only to protect them from infection, but also to give them time off to handle the daily demands of this crisis.

One thing that hasn’t changed: informing friends and family about a recent death through phone calls, texts, newspaper obituaries and in Facebook posts. What’s missing are funeral arrangements, and details about gatherings such as shivas, where, in the Jewish tradition, loved ones and friends get together at a home for a week after the burial to support the family of the deceased.

Phone Calls Are Important

So if we can’t mourn together in person, how do we offer comfort?

“We aren’t able to hug, and physically connect, so we need to rely on using our words,” says Kendall Kridner-Protzmann, a pastor of congregational care at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, Colo.

Kridner-Protzmann suggests calling mourners frequently. “Reach out through phone calls, and leave a message if necessary. Even just saying ‘This is really hard,’ is very healing.”

“When you can’t be physically present with a grieving loved one, you can still offer your emotional presence,” says Kelila Johnson, founder of Communing with Grief in Seattle. “There is solace in sitting quietly with someone, even if it’s over the phone or a video call. Often what grievers need most is to know that they don’t have to speak but that they are safe to speak, if they wish.”

Kessler suggests that in the first week after someone has passed, check in with loved ones multiple times. “If the person is in tears for an hour, you probably need to call daily,” he says. “If the mourner says that things are okay, you can probably check back in a couple of days.” He also strongly recommends calling instead of texting, and using FaceTime or Skype, to create a visual connection.

Technology Can Help

When you can’t gather in person, technology offers opportunities to comfort:

  • As mentioned, video calls are a great way to deepen your connection beyond audio.
  • Live streaming, which has been available for long-distance loved ones to view funeral services for many years, is now a necessity.
  • Social media is also helpful. “I’m usually not a big fan of Facebook,” says my friend Nikki. “My sister suggested we announce my dad’s passing on it, and I was floored by the comments we received.” Not only did Nikki receive hundreds of condolences, but she also heard from people from her childhood who shared stories about her father. “It was the greatest thing to hear from so many people. It really made me feel better,” she says.

Other Ways to Show You Care — In Person

I also learned four creative ways to get out and about to support those who are grieving.

Visit the grave. Just because you weren’t able to go to the burial, that doesn’t mean that you can’t go to the cemetery. “Any time after the burial, and while cemeteries are still open, you can go to the gravesite on your own, or at a distance from others, and pay your respects,” says Olson. Letting loved ones know you did this can offer comfort.

Bring food. “When you go food shopping, buy a bag of fruit for your friend, and drop it off,” says Kessler. “You don’t even need to go in the house.” Does your friend have a favorite restaurant? Order takeout, and deliver it.

Walk together — at a distance. Exercise is important to our mental and physical help at any time, but especially when grieving. “If you live nearby, offer to go for a walk with your friend,” suggests Dave Wyner, psychotherapist and certified grief counseling specialist in Louisville, Colo. “Make sure to follow health experts’ advice on keeping your distance. It might feel a little weird to walk that far apart from each other, but it can still feel incredibly supportive to the person grieving. It really comes down to helping them know they’re not alone with their pain.”

Volunteer. Obituaries often list charities you can donate to in someone’s honor. “Why not volunteer for that charity, by helping them out in person?” suggests Olson. He gives an example of The Humane Society. Instead of donating money (or in addition to it), you could offer to walk dogs, in the name of the deceased, he says. This is needed all the time, but now, it may be especially helpful.

How I’m Helping My Friend

Now that I’ve learned how to provide solace and love to those grieving during the pandemic, I’m planning to reach out to Nikki more often by phone. I will give her space to talk and I will listen.

I’m also going to offer to take a walk or a bike ride together (at a distance, of course). And I’m going to ask her what type of meal she and her family would like me to deliver.

The bottom line: We’re all struggling during this health crisis, but people mourning the deaths of their loved ones really need our support. While you may not be able to offer comfort through traditional grieving rituals, I hope these suggestions can help in a time when it is so needed.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Feeling Anguish?

Listen to Your Body. Not to Other People.

An exploration of different ways exercise and movement can be used to help with grief, trauma, or any other kind of big emotion.

By Candyce Ossefort-Russell

The body says what words cannot. — Martha Graham

I love swimming in Austin’s amazing Barton Springs Pool — it’s cold and enlivening. Most of the time I swim there three times a week, year round.

But last year my dad and my dog died in the depths of winter.

It doesn’t get that cold in Austin, but it takes much more mental discipline and grit to jump into the cold spring water when it’s 25–45 degrees outside than when it’s 95!

When my dad and my dog died, everything in me demanded that I pull in, curl up, and treat myself tenderly. Treating myself tenderly did not include swimming in the cold. It was hard to allow myself to give in to not swimming for an indefinite period time, especially during a phase of my life when I’m not getting any younger so exercise is essential for maintaining my energy and health.

Yet I remembered something crucial I’d learned about grief back in 1992 when my first husband died. After living all the way through that hell (and after helping many of my clients live through grief), the most important thing I’d tell my 1992, 30-year-old self from here is:

Pulling in, curling up, and convalescing will allow your grief to heal you. You will regain your energy over time, especially if you treat yourself tenderly now.

So last year after the deaths, I listened to my past self and surrendered to the urge to stay in where it was warm and to snuggle into my soft sheets. By summer, I was still sluggish and weighed down by grief, so I gave in to the urge to remain in the dark with the blinds drawn (instead of swimming) even when the summer sun beat down at 99 degrees.

(Note that I was not depressed. I didn’t feel bogged down and paralyzed with depression’s deadness. I was simply grieving. I can tell the difference. I’m going to write an entire post about discerning the difference between grief and depression soon.)

Even though I had learned the hard way that listening to my body in grief was the most useful strategy, I hadn’t lived through another big loss myself since learning the lesson. Living through fresh loss with insight gleaned from my past loss was like carrying a mini-mentor with me through the whole process. So I held onto faith that my body was telling me what I needed.

Thus it seemed miraculous to my present self that listening to my body’s need to lie around and restore during the most ripped-open phase of my grief did indeed allow me to heal and restore:

On my birthday in November, eleven months after my losses, I spontaneously needed to swim. Hard. In the cold water.

My body and soul needed to move — to expend energy, to feel blood pumping through my veins and cold water on my skin — in order to affirm my gratitude for still getting to be alive to mark another year while people I loved were no longer fortunate enough to have bodies that could know such joy. My arms reached and my legs kicked, and I felt at one with all the people I love, past and present. My heart burst wide with wonder as I felt it all.

Swimming on my birthday reignited my desire to swim regularly, so I picked it back up again, at the beginning of winter, without any hesitation. My body guided me through the whole process, down and through, and back up again. Amazing.

(Not that I’m “finished” with my grief, and not that I don’t still have sluggish days. It’s just that the phase of needing to pull in constantly has moved through, at least for now…)

***

If you’re grieving your own loss, or experiencing an intense emotional situation of some other kind, your body might tell you something similar to what mine did during this time of my loss. Or it might tell you something different. Every loss and every body is unique.

When my first husband died in 1992, that loss was a traumatic loss — sudden, unexpected, out of the natural order of things. The losses I experienced last January were different. They were in the natural order of things as my dad and my dog were both old and weakening — extremely painful but not traumatic. They were two distinct flavors of loss.

In 1992, I not only lost my husband in a devastating way, I also lost my entire identity and way of viewing the world. Nothing made sense any more. I was entirely disoriented and shattered.

So my emotions then were explosive, roiling, fierce. Sadness would practically knock me to the floor with its force. Rage at the universe over injustice burst out of my chest and throat. When I tried to rest and pull in, anguish pushed me to kick and scream. The feelings were so potent I needed to move them through my body.

I was a runner back then (before I blew out my knees), and running saved my life.

I buckled my year-old baby into our blue running stroller and ran until I couldn’t breathe. The pound, pound, pound of my feet upon the earth rattled the overwhelming feelings out of my body and into the earth. The earth absorbed them without complaint. Sweat poured down my chest and ragged breaths tore at my throat to match the intensity of my emotions, and helped me regain my sanity.

I’d arrive back home, fall onto the driveway, and sit on the blistering concrete while my son toddled around filling buckets with water from the hose. My breath would settle, and I’d feel able to make it through a few more hours.

Then, I could pull in and rest for a few hours after my boy was in bed. Before the roiling began again. At 2am. Every day. For a very long time.

***

There’s a whole lot if information I have about why movement and rest of different sorts help with intense emotions such as grief. I’ll write about that in another post.

But here I’m offering my own stories to give you permission to listen to your own body, to allow it to guide you through whatever kind of physical activity or rest will help you the most during your grief or other kinds of difficult emotions right now.

Unfortunately our culture is full of shoulds and prescriptions. People will tell you that you MUST move to prevent depression, or to pull yourself out of the (very normal) sluggishness of grief. Others will tell you that you MUST get your rest and not push yourself so hard.

In 1992, I definitely needed to learn the difference between listening to my body’s need to move for emotional expression, and my fear of sitting still to allow myself to rest. We all need some of both. But that was my lesson to glean. A lesson that was presented to me as a f***ing opportunity for growth within my grief. Not something that someone else could prescribe to me.

I wouldn’t have such faith in what I learned if I hadn’t wrestled with the difficulties myself.

I want you to know that your body is the container for all of your grief emotions, so your body will tell you what it needs. We’re socialized out of listening to our bodies, so it can take effort to learn to listen to the natural signals we’re getting. But I’m hoping that by hearing my stories, and having me articulate for you that both rest and movement of different sorts are extremely useful and natural ways of tending to your grief and other emotions, you’ll feel free to experiment.

Listen to your body.

Listen to your feelings.

Your grief is unique to you. Your loss is like no other.

Movement and rest both help, in their own ways, in their own time.

Let me know what works for you or what doesn’t…

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Death at a young age compounds the intensity of grief


Many people out there are suffering because of the death of a child.

By

A kind reader has reminded me that in a recent column when I gave examples of sad losses, I did not mention the loss of a child. She was right. I didn’t, although I have written about the death of a child in the past. I suppose it was not on my mind because we aren’t supposed to lose our children, not before us. I’ve corrected this in recent columns.

But as I thought about it, I know it happens more often than we’d like to think about. In just the last few months, several readers have written to me about their grief over the premature death of grown children in their 30s or 40s — one from the flu, which was particularly bad this year. Another was from a car accident, but it could have been a motorcycle crash, opioids, a heart attack, cancer — or war, mass shootings, anything that causes young deaths.

It feels both tragic and all backward when someone loses a child, no matter what age, whether young or adult. With our heightened expectation that life expectancy here in the U.S. is quite long, most of think we will live to be real old, and that modern medicine can cure just about everything.

Many of us are baby boomers, where we feel we will live just about “forever,” even though we really know life is finite. So a young or middle age death just doesn’t fit. We are truly caught off guard. It just seems wrong.

Recently a friend mentioned she was still “trying to get her head around” the sudden death of a 30-year-old friend. One reader who lost a 45-year-old son explained that part of the grief is the loss of family legacy, and all the bright future and promise of their lost son. It’s heartbreaking.

It also happens that people sometimes lose their spouse in their 40s or 50s, left not only alone but often with young children to raise as a single parent. This means somewhere there are also parents grieving over that death; the spouse was their grown child. So any death at a young age very much compounds the intensity of grief.

Some people have lost another young adult they were close to — a friend, a neighbor, a niece or nephew. To the bereaved, these young people could be so close they seem a lot like their own children. And to complicate matters further, such grief may be pretty much “invisible” because most people think intense grief is reserved for immediate family members.

Another type of invisible grief is over a miscarriage or infant death. This is virtually never mentioned in conversations, even among close friends and family. And if someone says something, it can be hurting or inappropriate rather than comforting, such as “there will be other babies,” or some similar unthinking comment.

So the point is: There are many people out there suffering because they have lost a child, and many have lost adult children. They need our support. One’s child is always our child, no matter what age. And some of this grief is rather “invisible” for several reasons — sometimes people just do not realize how heavily the death is weighing on their friends or relatives. They just don’t understand.

Some of it is long-term grief that will never go away. I don’t believe we need to dwell on grief all the time, but do try to be as supportive and as understanding as you can, even though it’s not something people usually discuss in everyday conversation.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!