Category: COVID-19

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The 6 stages of coronavirus grief

By Daniel Scott

As a band director, the coronavirus turned me into a person I didn’t recognize, and I am beginning to figure out how to become OK with that. If you are an educator like me, you probably led a semi-continuously busy life made up of moments. You planned those moments based off events through the year. From one event to the next, you would check the boxes.

For me, it looked like this: Holiday Concert? Check. All district auditions? Check. All county clinic? Done. Summer Convention schedule released? I’m ready.

Life was busy, and it was beautiful. With the passing of each event you felt more excitement to reach the next moment in time. You loved the structure of your pre-COVID-19 life and your ability to make a direct difference in the lives of the young people who trusted you to lead them. As a pre-coronavirus coach, dance instructor, or fine arts teacher, you went from changing the world one rehearsal or practice at a time to sitting on the couch in your eerily quiet living room.

You went from booked evenings and packed weekends to forcing yourself to open the backdoor for fresh air. You get fancied up to go to the grocery store with hopes that you will see any other form of face-to-face human life. Coronavirus you is not vibrant. Coronavirus you is not outgoing. And while coronavirus you has all the time in the world to be busy and get tasks done, you don’t want to move from your comfortable, you-shaped cushion on your new couch.

Why is that? How can you go from one of the most task-oriented people you know, to having to muster the motivation to tackle simple tasks? This shift is caused by much, much more than COVID-19, and to understand it, we’re going to have to look at the realm of psychology and, more specifically, grief.

A brief on grief

Grief is the common, internal feeling one faces when they react to loss. Bereavement is the “state of being” experienced when one has lost someone. If you have ever taken an introduction to psychology course, you have probably heard of the 5 stages of grief detailed in the book, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss, co-authored by Elisabeth Kuber-Ross and David Kessler. The book explored the grief process and identified 5 non-linear stages that exist throughout.

  • Denial
  • Bargaining
  • Anger
  • Depression
  • Acceptance

Kubler-Ross explained in the book that the stage of denial deals with bereavement and the feeling of disbelief for what has happened. The bargaining stage is known as the trade-off stage. During this development, the individual tends to make a deal with fate to gain more moments of time with the loved one they lost. In the anger stage, individuals find something or someone to place blame. In this stage, questions of fairness arise. The sadness stage sends individuals into deep depression and helplessness, and acceptance is the stage in which individuals feel a sense of understanding and the ability to continue through their grief journey.

Many, including myself, believed that grief only occurs when mourning the death of a loved one. It took me by surprise when I was talking through many of my thoughts and emotions surrounding COVID-19 with my principal, and she proclaimed, “You’re experiencing grief.”

“I can’t be experiencing grief,” I thought.

I have experienced the pain of mourning a death, and this feeling was nothing like it. I walked away from that conversation feeling like I was exaggerating the emotions I felt. I did not believe I could ethically compare losing a few concerts and events to the loss of a loved one. So I did some research, and here’s what I found.

Understanding the COVID-grief

“Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.”

– Vicki Harrison

Grief is highly individualized. Frequently, when we experience loss, we are able to skip many of the stages of the process. Others may experience instances where the stages reoccur. Kubler-Ross also believed that the stages of grief could be applied to any significant feeling of personal loss, not just death of a loved one. Kubler-Ross believed people could also experience grief over loss of a job, a relationship, anticipating one’s own death, or similar experiences.

Grief can be encountered by all who have had a major personal loss. For many, COVID-19 uprooted many aspects of day-to-day life: work, leisure, child care, and more. People all over the world have been forced to change their plans and adapt to new, uncertain circumstances. People have lost their normal routine and events they look forward to; as such, people are grieving what we could call a loss of expectation.

This means that COVID-19 grief is a reality and your feelings of loss and fear are valid. The truth is, there is not a “normal” type of grief. If you were to Google “types of grief,” you would meet an onslaught of websites labeling more than 10 different archetypes of grief. Anticipatory, complicated, cumulative, and  disenfranchised grief are just a few types that explain our COVID-19 life.

Anticipatory grief deals with the fear of what the future may hold. One typically incurs this type of grief when he or she receives a bad diagnosis, or when they begin to think of their own parent’s mortality, however, this type of grief also deals with the fear of the unknown. In a recent conversation with the Harvard Business Review, David Kessler stated the following:

With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

As Kessler mentions, the coronavirus is a threat that we can’t see. Further, it is unlike anything we have experienced, so we have difficulty predicting it and knowing what to expect. This uncertainty about the future is where anticipatory grief — this fear of what might lie in wait — can come into play. Anticipatory grief is related to anxiety and the fear of “what comes next.”

Complicated grief includes three different subtypes: chronic, delayed, and distorted. This grief type focuses on the feelings of loss that are long-lasting and disrupt your ability to do daily activities. For instance, this type of grief could manifest as the increased difficulty in getting off of the couch day after day. Some other possible symptoms of this grief are anger and irritability towards others and oneself. Complicated grief reminds us that being stuck in quarantine may not be the only reason you’re getting fed up with your significant other.

Cumulative grief refers to the feeling of loss one experiences when there is a chain of negative events one after the other following a loss. One encounters this type of grief when a second loss occurs while you are still grieving over the first. One tough aspect of COVID-19 has been the slow cancellations of every event and experience from March through the summer and beyond. To many — myself included — it has felt as if life was slowly being taken away one moment at a time. The intense feeling of loss that you may feel is cumulative grief.

You have not finished grieving over the loss of the musical being canceled, and now you’re having to deal with your spring recital being canceled as well. Both events are losses and caused a major disruption to your life. Continued disruptions and losses can send one into a tailspin that leads to a constant recycling of the grieving process. Because of this, the cumulative grief cycle could be very damaging to one’s psyche.

Disenfranchised grief occurs when society attempts to invalidate the grief of an individual, which leads to disenfranchisement. Many teachers are hearing invalidating statements such as, “At least you’re still getting paid. I’d like to get paid to sit around” or “I bet you’re happy to have more time with your family.”

Many of our students, specifically the class of 2020, are experiencing disenfranchised grief. How many of us have read statements such as, “It’s just prom” or “It’s not like they aren’t going to graduate. They just can’t walk on the stage. I wish I could’ve skipped my graduation”? While well-meaning, these statements serve to invalidate the intense feeling of loss that many students and staff are experiencing. These comments send the message that we “shouldn’t” feel this loss. Because of this, many become disillusioned from the grief felt.

The current culture has often made grief felt by educators and students insignificant. Without the ability to acknowledge this grief, feelings of anger, sadness, or loss can arise and be mis-attributed to other issues. All of this feeds the continuation through the grief cycle.

The human brain searches to make sense of what surrounds it. Unfortunately, we are in a constant state of an unknown, fear-inducing world, with a myriad of grief types that force us to feel lost even when we’ve jumped on our seventh Zoom call of the week. What can we do to overcome this grief?

Where do we go from here?

“We grieve because we love. How lucky we are to have experienced that love?” -Jahanvi Sardana

The first step of overcoming grief is understanding. This article doesn’t exist to be an exhaustive guide on how to overcome grief, but more to bring an awareness to what we may be experiencing. Some may be in our denial stages, pretending that the virus doesn’t exist, or in our anger stages where we are extremely angry with the social distancing measures put in place that have caused so much loss and anxiety in our lives. Bargaining may have occurred where we have decided to distance ourselves to be safe for a short period of time in hopes that everything would be “normal” after two weeks. Many of us may be feeling a sense of sadness or hopelessness believing that there is no end in sight.

Rather than be future-oriented, I believe that in this time we should stay present-focused. Every individual should extend grace and compassion to others and work every day toward acceptance.

I believe, much like Kessler, that there is a sixth stage of grief following acceptance. This stage deals with giving a meaning and purpose to the grief we experienced.

I believe that each of us has the unique ability to reach the end of this pandemic stronger, with a few new skills and an abundance of lessons learned.  We have to expect and understand that we may not function at the level that we normally might during this time — and that’s OK! As educators, our focus should be on providing. What experience can we create? What joy can we exude? What smile can we provide to our students and families in need?

Provide joy. Provide happiness. Provide humility. Provide understanding.

Grief is difficult. The emotions experienced are confusing and messy. We must understand that many of our days we will not be able to give as much of ourselves as we are used to, and that is OK.

Our 100% will be different each day, but we must focus on doing our best to provide what we can for the career that we love. The most important lesson I hope we all take away is to always love and appreciate the gifts life gives us every day.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How Death Doulas Have Adapted End-of-Life Care Amid COVID-19

By Ilana Kaplan

Christy Marek, a certified end-of-life doula, has seen firsthand the added stress that terminally ill individuals have had to endure because of the pandemic. One client had been living at home but decided that her health was putting too much added stress on her family. “She had considered going into a facility just so that she could get the level of support that she needed as she was becoming bed-bound,” says Marek, who is based in Minnesota. But the client found herself at a crossroads: she had to choose between the possibility of dying alone in a facility (upon admission, patients were required to quarantine alone with no visitation for two weeks) or continuing to rely on family care while spending the rest of her time at home.

Marek made several phone calls to facilities to advocate for her client. “I said, ‘What if she doesn’t have two weeks? What are you going to do?’” Marek recalls. Ultimately, her client ended up getting 24-hour home care, but it wasn’t her first choice. “People are then dying at home because the last thing they want is to go into a facility,” says Marek. “They don’t have time to quarantine for the amount of time that [facilities] need.”

For centuries, doulas have been assisting with childbirth, providing emotional, physical, and educational support during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. But there aren’t just doulas for the birthing process: over time, both officially and unofficially, end-of-life doulas have emerged to help individuals with palliative care and support their families through the grief that comes with losing someone. A 2017 study found that women who had continuous support during their labor—whether from a nurse, doula, or partner—reported a more positive birth experience. It seems likely that the same kind of constant emotional support from a death doula would have an equally positive effect on processing the grief around passing.

In a year when death and grief have become a constant, the palliative care process has reached a new level of complexity amid COVID-19. End-of-life doulas have always strived to be a support system for those who are terminally ill, but in 2020 the people who take on that responsibility have been challenged to think outside the box when it comes to caregiving. They’ve had to help their dying clients make unimaginable choices between risking virus exposure and spending their last days alone. They’ve also had their presence questioned at a time when their skills could be most valuable.

Alua Arthur, an end-of-life doula and founder of Going With Grace, has been trying to encourage clients to focus on what they do have control over, even when the world feels full of uncertainty. “Because they’re getting close to the end of life, I remind them that there are some things that are still firmly within our control,” says Alua. “[I have them] look at what it is that we’re trying to control and where the control actually exists. She has her clients work on “cultivating presence and practicing adaptability,” along with “exercises, like finding our feet and consistently planting our feet firmly on the ground [and] becoming present.”

Communication and connection have been the most challenging variables for doulas and their clients. Many in-person meetings with clients and their families have gone digital. For Arthur, FaceTime and Zoom have become essential for helping with clients’ health-related questions when she can’t physically be with them. “Family members [can] scan body parts through a video call, show me and say, ‘Does that look normal?’ Or, ‘She’s breathing like this, does that sound normal?’ And [they] hold the phone up [for me to hear] somebody’s breathing pattern.” That way, even if Arthur is not with the client, she can make an informed decision as to whether they should call the doctor. Arthur has also hosted webinars to help people experience grief and facilitate rituals for transitioning. She has helped coordinate with funeral homes to livestream funerals for clients so that more family members could participate.

For clients who are in assisted-living communities or the hospital, nurses often act as a bridge on behalf of doulas. Janie Rakow, a recently retired end-of-life doula and former president of the International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA), has been raising money for baby monitors for local hospitals so that doulas can keep in touch with their clients, talk to social workers and chaplains, and even play music. “Nurses and medical staff have been integral in helping doulas make sure they connect with families and play music until the end,” she says.

Omisade Burney-Scott, a full-spectrum doula based in North Carolina, has been encouraging her clients to “think about how you show up energetically when you can’t show up physically.”

“Because I’m a Southern Black woman, there’s so much ritual involved with death and dying in the South with Black folk,” says Burney-Scott. “It’s beautiful, it’s complex, but it’s highly ritualized.” Grieving has generally involved a lot of face-to-face interactions and “people coming to your house dropping off casserole after casserole,” so during the pandemic Burney-Scott has tried to help her clients try to find alternate activities that will create a similar feeling of closeness and community. One client with relatives spread throughout the United States and Europe had lost two family members and was looking to honor the deceased. “My question for this person was, ‘Where are they from? What are the things that are meaningful for your family? What are the things that you all love to do together?’ And one of the things that we talked about was food and how much food is a core part of their family culture.” Since their family already did a Zoom session every Sunday, Burney-Scott suggested that they make a dish that everybody in the family loves for their meeting. “Then, when you come to the Zoom call, y’all eat together and honor this person or these people who’ve made their transition,” Burney-Scott says.

End-of-life doulas also help their clients navigate and find support within a racist healthcare system. A 2017 study from Academic Emergency Medicine on implicit bias revealed that White patients were favored, especially by White doctors. Coronavirus has been two times as likely to kill Black and Latino people than White people. In June, Arthur was a panelist for a talk where she and other Black death doulas, along with grief and funeral professionals, discussed the implications of a “good death” in a racist society. More than 2,000 people signed up for the webinar, which touched on the “implicit bias that exists against Black workers, Black deceased and patrons of their families.” “I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say that racism or race should not be a factor in how we care for people at the end of the day,” says Arthur. “But in order for us to effectively care for people in the afterlife, we have to honor the reality of their lived experience. That includes race, their physical ability, [their] ability to hear, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, and every little part of themselves. We’re honoring a life, so we have to look at the whole life.”

Burney-Scott has been helping members of the Black community process continued grief after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and amid continued police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. “Grief is not an emotion that is mutually exclusive to physical death,” says Burney-Scott. “So what I have found is that there’s been an unrelenting nature to the grief that we’re all experiencing right now with the pandemic, with COVID-19, but also with racism and white supremacy.” Burney-Scott has been looking to her spiritual background to provide support for others. “My role in that has been to provide instructions and support around how to create your own altar, how to open your space and yourself up to either meditation, prayer, or conversation with your ancestors to ask for support for these families who have experienced the unimaginable,” she says.

More than ever, it’s been necessary for doulas to focus on possibility and opportunity as a way to keep their clients comforted and connected. Still, the challenges of limited physical interactions and restrictions due to COVID-19 have transformed their jobs. In the meantime, end-of-life doulas are doing everything they can to be there for their clients.“We support and empower,” Arthur says. “Why? Because we don’t want people to feel alone in the process. How? We show up.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The surprising benefits of contemplating your death

Now is the perfect time to face your fear of mortality. Here’s how.

By Sigal Samuel

Nikki Mirghafori has a fantastically unusual career. After getting a PhD in computer science, she’s spent three decades as an artificial intelligence researcher and scientific advisor to tech startups in Silicon Valley. She’s also spent a bunch of time in Myanmar, training with a Buddhist meditation master in the Theravada tradition. Now she teaches Buddhist meditation internationally, alongside her work as a scientist.

One of Mirghafori’s specialties is maranasati, which means mindfulness of death. Mortality might seem like a scary thing to contemplate — in fact, maybe you’re tempted to stop reading this right now — but that’s exactly why I’d say you should keep reading. Death is something we really don’t like to think or talk about, especially in the West. Yet our fear of mortality is what’s driving so much of our anxiety, especially during this pandemic.

Maybe it’s the prospect of your own mortality that scares you. Or maybe you’re like me, and thinking about the mortality of the people you love is really what’s hard to wrestle with.

Either way, I think now is actually a great time to face that fear, to get on intimate terms with it, so that we can learn how to reduce the suffering it brings into our lives.

I recently spoke with Mirghafori for Future Perfect’s limited-series podcast The Way Through, which is all about mining the world’s rich philosophical and spiritual traditions for guidance that can help us through these challenging times.

In our conversation, Mirghafori outlined the benefits of contemplating our mortality. She then walked me through some specific practices for developing mindfulness of death and working through the fear that can come up around that. Some of them are simple, like reciting a few key sentences each morning, and some of them are more … shall we say… intense.

I think they’re all fascinating ways that Buddhists have generated over the centuries to come to terms with the prospect of death rather than trying to escape it.

You can hear our full conversation in the podcast here. A partial transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Sigal Samuel

You’ve worked in Silicon Valley and you still live near there, so I’m sure you’ve encountered the desire in certain tech circles to live forever. There are biohackers who are taking dozens of supplements every day. Some are getting young blood transfusions, trying to put young people’s blood in their veins to live longer. Some are having their bodies or brains preserved in liquid nitrogen, doing cryopreservation so they can be brought back to life one day. What is your feeling about all these efforts?

Nikki Mirghafori

It’s the quest for immortality and the denial of death. Part of it is natural. Human beings have done this for as long as we have been conscious of the fact that we are mortal.

A person who really put this well was Ernest Becker, the author of the seminal book The Denial of Death. I’d like to offer this quote from him:

This is the paradox. A human is out of nature and hopelessly in it. We are dual. Up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill marks to prove it. A human is literally split in two. We have an awareness of our own splendid uniqueness in that we stick out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet we go back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

There is a whole field of research in psychology called terror management theory, which started from the work of Ernest Becker. This theory says that there’s a basic psychological conflict that arises from having, on the one hand, a self-preservation instinct, and on the other hand, that realization that death is inevitable.

This psychological conflict produces terror. And how human beings manage this terror is either by embracing cultural beliefs or symbolic systems as ways to counter this biological reality, or doing these various things — cryogenics, trying to find elixirs of life, taking lots of supplements or whatnot.

It’s nothing new. The ancient Egyptians almost 4,000 years ago, and ancient Chinese almost 2,000 years ago, both believed that death-defying technology was right around the corner. The zeitgeist is not so different. We think we are more advanced, but it comes from the same fear, same denial of death.

Sigal Samuel

It seems like in the West, we really have a bad case of that denial. I think we rarely talk about death or are willing to face up to the reality that we’re going to die. We seem to be wanting to always distract ourselves from it.

You are a Buddhist practitioner and you have a practice that is very much the opposite of that, which is mindfulness of death, or maranasati. You’ve done trainings and led retreats around this subject. But some people might say this is too morbid and depressing to think about. So before we actually delve into the mindfulness of death practices, could you entice us by telling us a few of the benefits of doing them?

Nikki Mirghafori

First and foremost, what I found for many people, myself included, is that facing the fact that I am not going to live forever really aligns my life with my values.

Most people suffer what’s called the misalignment problem, which is that we don’t quite live according to our values. There was a study that really highlighted this, by a team of scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. They surveyed a group of women and compared how much satisfaction they derived from their daily activities. Among voluntary activities, you’d probably expect that people’s choices would roughly correlate to their satisfaction. You’re choosing to do it, so you’d think that you actually enjoy it.

Guess what? That wasn’t the case. The women reported deriving more satisfaction from prayer, worship, and meditation than from watching television. But the average respondent spent more than five times as long watching television than engaging in spiritual activities that they actually said they enjoyed more.

This is a misalignment problem. There’s a way we want to spend our time, but we don’t do that because we don’t have the sense that time is short, time is precious. And the way to systematically raise the sense of urgency — Buddhism calls it samvega, spiritual urgency — is to bring the scarcity of time front and center in one’s consciousness: I am going to die. This show is not going to go on forever. This is a party on death row.

Sigal Samuel

So the approach here is to bring to the forefront of our consciousness how precious our time is, by impressing upon our minds how scarce it is. And that helps align our life with our values.

Are there other benefits to practicing mindfulness of death?

Nikki Mirghafori

The second benefit is to live without fear of death for our own sake. That way, we don’t engage in typical escape activities. And it frees up a lot of psychic energy. We have more peace, more ease in our lives.

The third benefit is to live without fear of death for the sake of our loved ones. We can support others in their dying process. Usually the challenge of supporting a loved one is that we have a sense of grief for losing them, but a lot of that grief is actually that it’s bringing up fear of our own mortality. So if we have made peace with our own mortality, we can be fully present and support them in their process, which can be a huge gift.

My mom passed away two years ago. And for me, having done all of these practices, I could be with her by her deathbed, holding her hand and supporting her so that she could have a peaceful transition. She didn’t have to take care of me so much and console me. She could be at peace and take delight in this mysterious process that we just don’t know what it’s like. It might be beautiful, might be graceful. We don’t know — there might be nothing; there might be something.

Sigal Samuel

Now I feel sufficiently enticed to learn about the actual practices of mindfulness of death. Let’s start with one that seems simple: the Five Daily Reflections, sometimes called the Five Remembrances, that are often recited in Buddhist circles. Would you mind reciting those?

Nikki Mirghafori

Happy to. These are the Five Daily Reflections that the Buddha suggested people recite every day.

Just like everyone, I am of the nature to age. I have not gone beyond aging.

Just like everyone, I am of the nature to sicken. I have not gone beyond sickness.

Just like everyone, I am subjected to the results of my own actions. I am not free from these karmic effects.

Just like everyone, I am of the nature to die. I have not gone beyond dying.

Just like everyone, all that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will change, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.

Allow whatever arises to come up. It’s okay. These contemplations can bring a lot up. So just be with them as much as possible.

Sigal Samuel

I’ve done these reflections before, but every time I do them, I notice that some are much harder for me to absorb than others. The fourth one — I’m of the nature to die — does not terrify me. Maybe that’s weird, but that’s not the one that really scares me. The one that I find impossibly hard is the fifth one. Everyone that I love and everything that I love is of the nature to change and be separated from me.

It’s really the death or the separation from the people I love that I find much harder to face than the death of myself. Because if I’m going to die, you know, then I’ll be gone. There won’t be any me to miss things.

Nikki Mirghafori

Yes. So appreciate and make space for the one that really touches you.

Also I would say that with the fourth one, making peace with our own death, I’ve done the practice and sometimes I’m like yeah, sure, whatever. And then I’ve really stayed with it, and thought, “This could be my last breath.” When the practice really takes hold and becomes alight with fire, it’s like, “Oh, my God, I am going to die!” It really hits home.

Sigal Samuel

Just to clarify, this is a separate mindfulness of death practice, where you contemplate with every breath, “This could be my last inhale. This could be my last exhale.”

Nikki Mirghafori

Yes. And to bring the historical context into it: This particular teaching is what’s called maranasati. Marana is death in Pali, the language of the Buddha. Sati is mindfulness. The mindfulness of death sutra, that’s where the Buddha taught it, and it’s actually quite a lovely teaching.

The Buddha comes and asks the monks, “How are you practicing mindfulness of death?” And one of them says, “Well, I think I could die in a fortnight, in a couple weeks.” Another one of them says, “Well, I think I could die in 24 hours.” Or “Well, I could die at the end of this meal.” Or “Well, I could die at the end of this bite of food I’m eating.” And another one says, “Well, I could die at the end of this very breath.”

And the Buddha says, “Those of you who said, two weeks, 24 hours, whatever — you are practicing heedlessly. Those who said right at this breath, you are practicing heedfully, correctly. That is the practice.”

There are ways to really bring the sense of immediacy and urgency to all this. It’s not out of the question that there could be an aneurysm or that a meteor could just hit the Earth in this moment. Use visualizations; be creative.

Sigal Samuel

Another thing I find really helpful is remembering the idea of impermanence. Which, of course, is the theme of our whole conversation — that our whole life is impermanent — and that’s a very central Buddhist teaching. But also any emotion that I’m feeling is impermanent. So if I’m feeling an intense surge of fear as I do a practice, that’s impermanent, too.

Nikki Mirghafori

Yeah, I love that. When I teach impermanence, there are little impermanences that come and go, and then there is the big impermanence, which is your life! I’m chuckling because this is a case where impermanence is on your side. Impermanence is just a rule of how things run in this world. It’s impersonal. It’s just the way things are. But in our perspective, it’s either working for us or against us.

Sigal Samuel

Can you tell me about another kind of contemplation — the “corpse contemplation” or “charnel ground contemplation”? Charnel grounds are these places where, after people have died, their bodies are left to decay above ground, to rot in the open air. And Buddhist monks would go and observe them up close, right?

Nikki Mirghafori

Many monks do that, especially in Asia. In order to become more intimate with a sense of mortality, the practice is to go to the charnel ground and to actually see a corpse. And the contemplation is: My body, this alive body, is just like this body that is decaying. It’s in different stages of being a body, of decomposing.

A specific practice in the Buddhist canon is to contemplate a corpse in different stages of decay. This particular practice requires a sense of stability of mind. Do the other ones first. I only teach it on a retreat when there’s a container of safety, holding people and supporting them through it.

Sigal Samuel

I definitely have not yet worked myself up to doing corpse contemplation by looking at images of actual human corpses. But when I go for a walk, whenever I see a dead bird or squirrel or mouse that’s been run over in the road, I actually pause and take a minute to look at it. I’m trying to ease my way into this practice.

Nikki Mirghafori

Brilliant. Similarly, another informal practice I wanted to share is having a memento mori. Like a little skull, or those bracelets that are all skulls. I just drew on a little Post-It a skull and bones, and posted it on my computer monitor, so I would remember: Life is short. I’m going to die.

I’ve had various memento moris on my desk throughout the years, and I invite people to have them. They don’t have to be sophisticated. On a piece of paper, just write out, “Life is short” or “You are going to die” or “Traveler, tread lightly.” Whatever works for you to keep death in your perspective. And I think it’s good to switch memento moris around so that your mind doesn’t get used to seeing the same thing all the time.

Sigal Samuel

I’m glad you brought this up because I was going to say the corpse contemplation reminds me a lot of that memento mori tradition, which is a centuries-long tradition in Christianity. So many different religious traditions have emphasized the importance of meditating on our death and have devised ways like the memento mori to try to keep forcing the ego to recognize its looming demise.

Nikki Mirghafori

Yes. And I know that for me, I feel most alive and I feel happiest and I feel most connected with myself, when I’m aware of my death. If it happens for a day or two that it’s not in the forefront for whatever reason, I’m not as bright, as sharp, as alive. So I just love bringing it back. It enlivens me. It supports me to live more fully and hopefully die with more delight and joy and curiosity.

Sigal Samuel

I’m wondering if you can help me with something else. I mentioned earlier that I’m not really scared of my own death so much, but I am scared of the death of the people I love. And especially during the pandemic, I think that’s causing a lot of anxiety for me and probably a lot of others. We’re scared about the potential death of our grandparents, our parents, our friends. Is there a way to free ourselves of the overwhelming fear of their death?

Grief is a natural part of the process. However, it is complicated by our own seen and unseen fear of death. So I invite you to actually work with the practice of making peace with your own death. That’s what’s underlying it. Even if you think you’re not afraid of your own death, you probably are.

When people are really at peace with their own passing, there is a different perspective. There’s a different way of being with the fear or sadness of losing others. There is still a pain of loss, but it shifts.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How To Handle Prolonged Grief for Pre-Pandemic Life

By Mary Grace Garis

Early on in this pandemic, many found themselves mourning the loss of normalcy that came with abiding by stay-at-home orders to fight the spread of COVID-19. In late March, a Harvard Business Review article explained this constant din of sadness to be grief about the disruption to life as we know it. That was five months ago, though. Even then, while steeped in grief, many still reserved hope that “back to normal” was a stone’s throw away, and hadn’t yet canceled those summer vacation plans or put other long-term life plans on hold. But here we are, still clouded by a mourning that’s grown so pervasive, it’s become more of a prolonged grief that is sadly beginning to feel normal itself.

The prolonged grief of mourning a former way of life isn’t akin to grieving a life, of course. And this means the current situation isn’t necessarily indicative of having prolonged grief disorder, a condition marked by long-term grief in response to the death of a loved one. But, the prolonged grief felt for pre-pandemic life requires navigating a complicated tangle of emotions, nonetheless.

Furthermore, given that the stages of grief already mark a complicated, nonlinear process, how can you mourn something so ongoing and intangible as pre-pandemic life? Below, grief counselor Diane P. Brennan, LMHC, breaks down how to grieve effectively about missing the way things were.

Keep reading 5 tips from a grief counselor for dealing with the prolonged sense of grief about the loss of normalcy during the pandemic.

1. Acknowledge your grief

With so many tragedies transpiring, it may to feel natural to cope by intellectualizing your feelings and essentially disallowing yourself from feeling them. But recognizing that you’re grieving—even if what, specifically, you’re grieving seems silly—is the first step toward moving forward.

“Allow yourself to simply acknowledge that you are grieving, that this is okay and a normal response to an experience that is completely new and unprecedented for the entire world,” says Brennan. “Don’t deny that you miss your pre-pandemic life. Acknowledge that your are grieving and it is a legitimate response to the stressful events happening in the world.”

2. Validate your losses

Take inventory of your losses and seek to understand their dimensions. For example, I recently learned that my favorite pizza spot is shutting down, which led me to feel grief about never having another thin-crust slice with butternut squash, goat cheese, and balsamic drizzle. But upon deeper thought, I realized what I’m really mourning is a space that made family dinners not only tolerable, but throughly beautiful experiences that presented an opportunity to make memories.

“By validating the living losses, we can experience a sense of relief. Allow your grief to be instructive and guide you toward a path of healing.” —grief counselor Diane P. Brennan, LMHC

So, to understand what it is you’re mourning and what primary feelings are being shaken up, do a similar deeper dive into your grief. What are you feeling? Sadness, fear, hurt, frustration? Be curious, and consider breaking out a pen and paper to keep track. “See if you can validate your losses and name them,” Brennan says. “By validating the living losses, we can experience a sense of relief. Allow your grief to be instructive and guide you toward a path of healing.”

3. Use rituals to acknowledge your losses

Across many religions, cultures, and ways of life, certain rituals are often invoked when someone dies, whether it’s a wake, funeral, shiva, memorial, three-paragraph-long Instagram eulogy, or otherwise. These practices honor what has been lost and symbolically mark an ending for those who remain. And the practices can still exist to help cope with living losses and feelings prolonged grief.

“Find ways to create personal rituals to help give meaning to your pandemic losses,” says Brennan. “You can write in a journal about your pandemic experiences; play music that makes you feel connected to your pre-pandemic life; create a collection of items that remind you of your pre-pandemic life and put them in a special place; or find ways to give to your community and make a difference for others in the post-pandemic world.”

4. Create realistic expectations for post-pandemic life

“Although life will be different, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be rewarding and meaningful,” says Brennan. “Begin to work on creating realistic expectations by shifting your mind-set by reimagining the world.”

Statements like, ‘It might be a very different world now, although let’s find new ways to…’ may help you reimagine what life can look like. For example, if you love to travel, you may feel extra frustrated about canceling or postponing all of your upcoming itineraries. But you can engage in new new hobbies, identify new interests, and connect with others in different ways. Maybe you can embrace RV life over jet-setting—which is a different adventure in itself.

5. Address existential concerns

It’s fair to assume that no matter what you had in mind for this year, it’s unfolded quite differently. Whether that means an upended career trajectory, a halted or spurred relocation, a shattered relationship, or actual human loss, resolving these big points of identity-centric existential grief is complicated. But, you can start rebuilding with a grounding mantra.

“Create a phrase or affirmation you can say to help you reconnect to purpose and meaning,” Brennan says. “For example, ‘I know it’s hard to understand how to navigate the uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to the world. It will not last forever, and I will begin to look for new ways to find meaning and purpose in my world.’”

And you will. Even if the way in which life is unfolding feels unfamiliar and scary, know that with every ending comes a new beginning. And with new beginnings come hope.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Reflections on getting ready to die

By

So far, I’m healthy, thank Pan, for a man my age, and except for a few non-life-threatening annoyances of long years’ use, my body seems to be holding up OK, and I’m grateful for what luck I’ve had. But I know that could change any minute. The stranger’s cough in some store, the contaminated fingerprint on the copier, the idiot with his nose outside his mask, who knows, you could get infected almost anywhere, via all sorts of sneaky vectors, and there really is no safe place.

So it’s a good time to think about contingencies, just in case. And the most inevitable and uncertain roll of the dice is death. If you catch COVID-19, it’s a long shot that it will kill you—unless of course you’re old, or fat, or already sick with something, or possibly young and otherwise healthy, nobody’s really sure why it takes some people—but this seems to me as good a time as any to get ready to die.

One thing I’ve always loved about gospel music is its existential urgency: You’re going to die and you’d better be ready to meet your Maker. If you believe in sin, you’ve sinned and it’s time to atone. You wish you could apologize to whomever you’ve hurt. And if you go down that road of remorse you’re in danger of being drawn into a black hole of a past you’ll never escape from. But maybe there’s a way to exorcise those bad deeds, some ritual—confession or spirit dance or primal scream—that can cleanse your soul of the shame.

Or you can forgive yourself for being human and screwing up repeatedly as nearly everyone does. You can accept your imperfections in whatever time is left, and maybe there’s time to correct them in your behavior and in relations with others. Maybe it’s not too late to change for the better.

There’s nothing like a deadline as a motivator, and the ultimate deadline is the greatest motivator of all because there is no grace period or overtime or extra innings. Death is a dead end. So you’d better get it together before it’s a done deal.

Thinking you could die any day brings your surroundings into sharper focus. More and more I appreciate the small pleasures—the sight of pelicans, smell of jasmine, sound of a song in the car, tactile feel of addressing an envelope and selecting the perfect stamp for the recipient, taste of the pasta sauce made from ingredients bought at the farmers market, friendly twinkle in the eye of the farmer as she hands you your change and you exchange masked thank-yous—and I seem to find them everywhere now that I’m about to be bereft of everything. When you’re about to lose it all, you realize what a gift it has all been.

So from imminent loss of everything comes a suddenly discovered abundance of what could never be kept anyway. As W.S. Merwin put it: “What you do not have you find everywhere.” Or Gary Young, my old friend who barely survived cancer in his 20s: “I’ve never felt more alive than when I was dying.” According to one biographer, the last words of Jorge Luis Borges were: “This is the happiest day of my life.” Or Page Smith in his final minutes: “It’s been a great life.”

These expressions of appreciation, of gratitude, of relief from all the suffering and distractions, remind me of how I’d like to live the rest of my days, no matter how much or how little time I have left. I don’t know whether time can be “wasted”—but I want to make the best possible use of it while I have the chance. That means not clicking on every link or trying to be liked or aspiring to other people’s expectations. Being ready to die means being ready to tell the truth. Any words you say could be your last.

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Why It’s So Important to Understand Grief During Coronavirus

It’s quite normal to be experiencing grief during the coronavirus pandemic—even if you haven’t lost someone to the virus. Here, experts talk about why you might be feeling this way, the stages of grief, and how to process your emotions.

By Ellie Trice

The coronavirus pandemic has us all learning to grapple with unprecedented and incalculable loss. If it’s tangible—loss of a job, a home, a gym, a graduation or wedding ceremony—it’s often accompanied by a sense of shame and confusion. It’s easy to think: “when over half a million people have lost their lives, does it really matter if I have to miss my bachelorette party?”

Actually, it’s very fair to be mourning these losses, according to grief expert and therapist Claire Bidwell Smith. Luckily, there are some tactics that can help mitigate the pain.

Our idea of grief is always that it has to be for a person that we lose—but right now, during the pandemic, we’re grieving on so many different levels. We’re grieving a way of life, we’re grieving our kids being home from school, we’re grieving our economy, changes in politics. I think so many of us have had to say goodbye to so many things immeasurably, and we don’t think of these things as worthy of grief, but they are.
– Claire Bidwell Smith, therapist and grief expert

As a global community, we’re living through a situation unlike anything we’ve ever witnessed, and with no end in sight, it’s perfectly normal for you to be experiencing unprecedented feelings of fear and loss.

“I’ve noticed during this time, that many people continue to run from their grief because there are plenty of ways to be distracted,” says Erin Wiley, M.A., L.P.C.C., clinical psychotherapist and the executive director of The Willow Center, a counseling practice in Toledo, Ohio. “But at some point, grief does come knocking, and it always requires payment.”

The latest surge of the virus sets the number of infections at more than 3.4 million confirmed cases at the time of publication (and counting) in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Many will have to endure this experience—and cope with grief—physically isolated from the very people who would, under normal circumstances, be there for them. So what are we to do?

Here, grief expert and therapists offer insight into understanding your grief, how to cope with it, and why staying hopeful is the key to getting through it all.

Recognize That Your Grief Is Real and Valid

“In general, people have a pretty hard time giving themselves permission to grieve,” says Smith. “So when it looks a little different than we think it should, it’s even more difficult to give yourself that consent.”

And while the whole world is grieving right now, people are also likely to discount their own losses—saying things like “well, it was only a wedding, and we’re all going to live even though we didn’t get to have it” or “my husband lost his job, but I have mine, so we have a lot to be grateful for.”

“Often, we discount our grief, because there are so many worse-case scenarios—especially if you haven’t lost someone to the pandemic,” says Wiley.

It goes without saying that losing a person you love is an irreplaceable kind of loss. When you cancel an event or lose a job, you still have hope that you can have that thing again, whereas, when you lose a person, you don’t get to hope that they will come back. “We have this idea that, somewhere down the road, life will hopefully go back to normal and we’ll be able to have all these things again that we’re missing, but we really can’t replace a graduation that was supposed to happen at the end of the school year. In two years, it isn’t going to be the same,” says Wiley.

Grief takes on many forms and can manifest as both physical and psychological symptoms, including (but not limited to) anger, anxiety, crying spells, depression, fatigue or lack of energy, guilt, loneliness, pain, sadness, and trouble sleeping, according to the Mayo Clinic. For those mourning a more complex loss (such as that of a missed milestone or celebration), grief can play out in similar ways that a concrete loss (such as a death) does—or in more distraction-focused behavior like eating, drinking, exercising, or even binge-watching Netflix in order to avoid the emotions under the surface, says Wiley. Which brings us to…

Spend the Time You Need to Emotionally Process Your Loss

Both Wiley and Smith say it’s essential to really grieve each part of what is now gone. Engaging in mindful activities like journaling and meditation can help tremendously in helping you acknowledge and process your emotions, as well as find resolution in your process.

“The effects that come from pushing grief away are anxiety, depression, anger, whereas if you can move through them and let yourself feel everything, there’s often some positive transformational things that can happen. It can feel scary to enter into that space; sometimes people feel like they’re going to start crying and never stop, or they’ll fall apart, but really the opposite is true. You will for a minute, you will have your big deep cry, and then, you will feel that relief and that release,” says Smith.

Mental health nonprofit Mental Health America recommends the PATH system for processing negative emotions. When you feel yourself spiraling into a moment of sadness or anger, try following these steps:

  • Pause: Instead of acting on your feelings right away, stop and think things through.
  • Acknowledge what you’re feeling: Try to name what you’re feeling and why—are you really angry that something happened, or are you sad? Whatever it is, it’s ok to feel that way.
  • Think: Once you’ve figured out what exactly it is that you are feeling, think about how you can make yourself feel better.
  • Help: Take action toward whatever you decided might make you feel better. This could be anything from calling a trusted friend or letting yourself cry to writing out your emotions or practicing belly breathing.

Processing your emotions is not an easy thing to do—it takes maturity and a whole lot of discipline, and often our distractions from grief can play out in harmful ways (such as substance abuse or withdrawing from our support system). And while, as a species, humans are engineered to deal with this sort of pain, we are great at avoiding it, especially when every part of our being tells us to run away, says Wiley.

Avoidance manifests itself in many forms. “Americans, people in general, are really good at constantly running from how they feel,” she says. “We watch Netflix, and drink wine, and go running, and have parties with friends, we eat to excess, all to fill that void, but we have to just let the feelings in.” You may think that you’re coping in a healthy way, but there’s a fine line where something can become an unhealthy coping mechanism: “We all have a tendency to move toward a coping skill and using it so much that it causes problems in our lives,” she says. For example, a maladaptive coping skill could be running—it’s not inherently bad, but if it becomes compulsive or you can’t stop doing it, well, anything in excess can be harmful, she adds.

“It takes a really evolved mental state to walk into grief and say, ‘I’m gonna stay with this,” instead of avoiding it, says Wiley. “Instead of sitting on your couch and eating ice cream and watching Netflix, that might look like sitting on your couch with no food and writing in a journal, talking to a therapist about it, or going for a walk or sitting in the backyard and just thinking,” she says.

Wiley also encourages her patients to pay attention to the way certain activities make them feel. “I would challenge any of my clients to, before starting up a distraction, ask yourself, on a scale of 1-10, how do you feel? If it’s a lower number after you’re done, maybe you need to reexamine if that activity is good for you. [It’s important to] have self-awareness of whether a behavior is helpful or hurtful and deciding how much time you want to devote to it,” she says.

When sitting with those feelings, be it in yoga, meditations, journaling exercises, or therapy, Wiley encourages her clients to focus on their breath and focus on being mindful of your current thoughts and feelings. Take advantage of one of many great meditation apps, online courses, or yoga classes to help slow down your mind.

The loss of a romantic relationship factors in here as well—so many people are going through separations, break-ups, and divorces, and the pandemic only piles on those feelings of isolation. That’s why, Wiley argues, now is a better time than ever to work on your emotional health, so that every relationship further down the road is stronger, and your strength can be built now.

“There’s something helpful about having the ability to see that dealing with emotional pain now will help you be a better person later. And it will and should improve any relationships you may have down the line,” says Wiley.

Seek Out Support—Virtual or In-Person—to Talk About Your Grief

Both Wiley and Smith agree that one of the most vital things you can do to help navigate the grieving process is to find supportive people who can listen with empathy.

“Don’t be afraid to seek support,” says Smith. “Some people think they should be doing better or think they shouldn’t be having this hard of a time. That’s the first thing that we have to let ourselves off the hook about. For someone with pre-existing anxiety, it can be an especially hard time. Support is so, so accessible right now—whether it’s in the form of online therapy, medication, or whoever you would normally turn to for a listening ear.”

Additionally, both Wiley and Smith are part of grief support groups and are in awe of how helpful they have been.

“I started this online group for women called ‘Manage Your Shift.’ We meet every morning and I guide them through what I needed for myself but now what we share together. We’ll do an inspirational reading for the day, track our gratitudes, talk about emotional health–we do a bit of meditation, light stretching, and setting intentions. We joined because we were all floating and lost and trying to find some meaning in this time—there’s nothing to anchor us, and this really has helped fill that void,” says Wiley.

Smith also touts the benefit of support groups. “Being with other people going through the same kind of loss as you create such an amazing synergy. It’s very accessible, a lower cost, you can do it from anywhere, and you can be working with professionals that maybe you wouldn’t have had access to previously,” she says. Other online resources Smith recommends include: Psychology Today, Modern Loss, Hope Edelman, The Dinner Party, and being here, human.

While it’s is still lacking that in-person magic of a hug or eye contact, it’s so much better than nothing at all. So rather sitting at home in your grief, meeting up with others and a professional who can guide you through it is really vital. And it works.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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End-of-life planning during the coronavirus pandemic, in 8 steps

How to make crucial financial and health care decisions for you and your loved ones.

By Ann Neumann

Surely you’ve heard it’s a good idea to have a will, just in case anything should happen. Yet we tend to put off completing the paperwork — the documents are confusing and it can be distressing to think about our own mortality. A 2017 study found that only about a third of Americans have completed the necessary end-of-life forms.

The Covid-19 pandemic now has many scrambling to figure out how to get wishes into writing. The coronavirus has reminded us that mortality is unpredictable and so it’s a good time to get our medical and financial matters in order.

The benefits to doing so are many: peace of mind knowing that you will get the medical treatment you want; that your possessions and assets, many or few, will be given to those you choose; that you are protecting your family and friends from having to guess what you would want; and preventing the squabbles that could erupt from family disagreements.

But how to complete the necessary paperwork while in social isolation? In some ways, self-isolation provides the perfect opportunity to get your documents together, but finalizing them can be difficult when a notary and witnesses can’t be in the same room with you.

Signing off, online

On March 20, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made New York one of the more than 20 US states to allow remote online notarization of documents — providing a solution to the challenge of self-isolation. It is a temporary law, and no one knows what it will mean once the pandemic has subsided. New York state also requires two witnesses (laws vary by state) to sign some of these documents, a problem that the temporary notarization law does not explicitly address.

Peter Strauss, a senior partner at Pierro, Connor & Strauss and a founding member of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, has instituted a protocol that he and his firm believe will accommodate remote witnesses. Using a video chat program like Zoom, GoToMeeting, or FaceTime, witnesses show their ID and are recorded signing the document by the notary public. Still, Strauss recommends revisiting all documents once your state has safely reopened and completing them in person.

Fern Finkel, a Brooklyn elder care lawyer, said she was concerned that the online notarization process, depending on how the witnesses are involved, could leave documents open to contest. She, too, advised that any documents completed now with online notarization be revisited in the future.

But she and other experts said it is still very important to take steps now to account for medical and financial contingencies should you become ill. “The pandemic is a reason to act, not to delay necessary planning,” Strauss said.

As far as medical contingencies go, “it is really important for doctors to always be guided by the voice and values of the patient,” said Dr. VJ Periyakoil, associate professor of medicine at Stanford and director of the Stanford Palliative Care Education & Training Program. To preserve patients’ voices, Periyakoil and her team have worked with patients to create “The Letter Project,” free and simple forms that help patients communicate their wishes to their family and doctors.

The letters, which are not state-specific and come in eight languages, provide a structured way for each person to think through these important, timely, and emotionally charged issues. They can be printed, filled out, and attached to any state’s forms, also available online. “Our goal is to democratize health care,” Dr. Periyakoil told me, “If people have to choose between groceries or advance directives, groceries are always going to win.”

To get yourself and your loved ones (legally) prepared, here are eight important steps to take.

What you should be doing right now

1. Organize. “The first thing you have to do is understand what you have,” Finkel said. Pull out all your existing documents and organize them in one place. Do you have a health care proxy (designation of a person to make your medical decisions when you can’t), a HIPAA authorization (designation of a person to access your doctor and medical information), a living will (statement of what medical treatments you want in various situations), an intent to return home, a power of attorney, a trust, and/or a last will and testament (statement of how you would like your assets distributed)?

Collect these items in one place in your home — a desk drawer, say, or a file box. (If your documents are somewhere else in a safe deposit box, leave them there — just make sure your family members know where they are.)

Once you’ve done an audit of these documents, you can arrange an online consultation with a knowledgeable attorney to help guide you through what needs to be done. (Justia provides a list of elder law lawyers, for example, or ask your friends for a recommendation.)

To this file, add other essentials that your family members might need should you be incapacitated: checkbooks, insurance policies, safe deposit box keys, Social Security card, passport, birth certificate, and other identification, mortgage, deed or lease for your home, and vehicle titles.

2. Beneficiary designations. During this crisis (or at any time), it is advisable to designate beneficiaries on all of your accounts. Take a look at bank accounts, retirement accounts, and investment accounts to see if they have a beneficiary designation.

“People don’t understand that how accounts are titled is supreme to what’s in a will,” Finkel said. For instance, if your will divides your assets equally among your three children but your oldest daughter is the beneficiary on a bank account, she will receive the accounts’ balance upon your death.

Which means that much of your property designation can actually be done remotely by requesting the appropriate form from your bank or financial adviser and returning it by mail. “If these forms need to be notarized, you can do so remotely,” Finkel said.

3. Health care proxy. If you are in isolation with others you may be able to fill out a health care proxy. The document — which varies by state — often requires two witnesses, like your home health aide and your best friend (neither can be your assigned agent). The proxy allows you to appoint an agent who will make your medical decisions should you become incapacitated. You do not need a lawyer or a notary to complete this form. (AARP provides links to these forms for every state.)

4. HIPAA. Everyone should complete a HIPAA form. “If you can’t get two witnesses [for a health care proxy] because you’re self-isolated,” Finkel says, “you can still do a simple authorization [the HIPAA form] to let your close people be able to speak to doctors.”

At a time when visitors are not allowed in hospitals or nursing homes, the HIPAA — an acronym for the law that protects patient privacy, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — will allow your designated loved ones to talk to your doctors about your status. Also, Finkel says, you can name as many designees as you want, just fill out the form with their names and contact information

Once you have completed a health care proxy and/or a HIPAA form, take a photo of them and share it with your designee. “I have HIPAA authorizations for my dad and my husband on my phone,” Finkel told me. They’re at her fingertips should she need them in an emergency. (You can access the HIPAA form here.)

5. Financial institution power of attorney. You can also complete a basic power of attorney form with your bank that designates a person to make financial transactions in those corresponding accounts. You can request the form and, if the institution allows, notarize it remotely. Some banks may have their own procedure, so check with them first.

“Do whatever you can right now to set up a designee for each of the banks you use,” Finkel recommended.

6. Direct deposit and direct pay. Now that you’re at home, it’s the perfect time to put all your bills and monthly payments online. Have your income deposited into one account and your regular bills auto paid from the same account. Heat, electric, gas, cell phone, cable, wireless, water — and your monthly rent or maintenance fee if possible.

“Get everything online, electronically paid, so that all of these things are seamless,” Finkel told me. Should you have to be hospitalized (hospital stays for severe cases of Covid-19 last an average of 10-13 days, with some lasting much longer), when you come home all of your services will be in place.

7. Passwords. While you’re setting up your bills for auto pay, organize all your online passwords. Once you’ve recorded the username and password for all of your utilities, do the same for your online accounts like email, social media, entertainment services, and other online platforms. Share this document with your most trusted person so that they’ll have it in your absence.

8. Have the conversation. This is also the time to talk to your loved ones about your health care and financial decisions. This difficult time might actually make the conversation easier for you and your family. “People around me are dying,” Finkel said. “We’re in a pandemic, and everyone is starting to see their own mortality. Let your loved ones know your wishes.” Tell the people you love where your documents are, and give your health care proxy, power of attorney, and HIPAA to your trusted agents named within them.

And there is one more important thing: “We can take this time to talk to our loved ones,” Periyakoil told me. “If there is one thing even more important than advanced directives, it’s really telling our friends and family how much we love them.”

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