This feeling, it’s grief. And it doesn’t feel good.
Knowledge about knowledge gives us the power to overcome. I have spent some time thinking about death and grief in recent years, and as time has passed, I have spent as much time thinking about the grief itself as grieving. Losing loved ones was , for me, pivotal. It rocked my world and left me reeling.
And, as all of us undergo seismic change, and as the world continues to be forced to deal with the pandemic, familiar bells goes off in a corner of my mind. Thinking about our reaction to Covid-19, observing reactions in different parts of the world to lockdowns, travel restrictions, huge numbers of casualties and deaths, it starts to look a lot like grief on a massive scale. Think about news media you have seen recently and check off each of these if they sound familiar:
People denying they believe there is a problem, ignoring rules, expressing disbelief that anything is wrong, demanding to be able to celebrate Christmas/graduation/weddings as usual.
Stories of anger, protests at lockdowns, fights over mask wearing, social media skirmishes between friends, violence against governments and businesses.
Optimists telling us that if we just stay home for a few weeks, things will return to normal, bargaining with themselves and anyone who will listen, to try and push past the pandemic.
Despair and depression from people fed up with all the uncertainty and ever-changing, always-negative news of second, third, fourth waves of infection and no end in sight. More lost jobs, lost months of school, lost friends and relatives.
Some small but growing pockets of understanding that this is real, this is changing our world, this is not the flu, there are steps we can all take to help keep it under control. People accepting that the pandemic is real and we can choose to respond in a way that sees an end to it all.
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. You may recognize these as the 5 stages of grief, identified by Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler. And, of course I was not the only one to see this. The Harvard Business Review ran a story titled “That discomfort you’re feeling is grief.” Google it and you will find a lot more stories of that nature. And this is just for grief as a feeling in relation to the overall effects on our daily life. We are experiencing feelings about the way things used to be as if that life had suddenly died. This is before you acknowledge the massive number of people who must also grieve loved ones during this time. Grief for the life we once had exacerbating, coloring, amplifying the grief we feel for people taken from us by or during the time of Covid-19.
And to come back to the idea of knowledge about knowledge, and how that can help us. How many of us are equipped to recognize grief in ourselves and others? How many of us can see past the anger and sadness and denial and see the common pain that might be the cause? How many of us are experienced enough to really know grief, let alone deal with it?
It’s one thing to recognize this feeling as grief but then ask yourself how many of us have tools to deal with this. For me, this blog is the process. If it only helps one other person, it will be worth writing. And if that person is me, I will do my best to share my newfound knowledge about knowledge.