How Do I Grieve?… The Chaos of Grieving

By Samantha Woo, LCSW, Certified Anxiety Therapist

Posted: April 2, 2020

It is so interesting how different “stages” of grief ( Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Sadness, Acceptance) surface at various times for different people. Most of have learned in Psychology 101 that these happen in some kind of order, but experience will tell us that there is no order in grief. Grief can be pretty chaotic. One minute you are holding together, and another minute you are sobbing. Others will just “turn the page”, and with a stiff upper lip move on. Still others hold onto resentment and anger that is unresolved for decades.

I’d like to welcome all these stages of grief. There is space for all these reactions in grief. Not just here on this page, and in this moment, but wherever we may see such stages manifest around us. And we will see it manifest all around us soon if not already.

As we battle and eventually emerge this Covid-19 crisis eventually, our world will look different. It already does. Battlescars will be visible both in good ways and bad. People who survive may be more grateful and deem precious what was taken for granted (health, fresh air, freedom of movement, loved ones). On the other hand, we may see war-torn faces, full of resentment ready to jump on someone at the slightest offense. Others may dissociate with shell-shock, others full of unconscious resentment, after the devastation. Or we may see people sad, and retreat even further.

We will see that grief is not just for those who lost loved ones to Covid-19. It is for all of us who lost the normal we knew. The jobs we said goodbye to. The future we had planned. The ideas we had of what Spring 2020 was supposed to look like- graduations, proms, sports events, just gathering and having human contact, peaceful, and just unassuming breath. We may be grieving now, whether any of us is in denial, and insisting this is a conspiracy, or in deep sadness, or in anger, or still trying to make sense of it. We are then grieving, and will be a grief-stricken human race. And all forms are welcome, as they need to be expressed. In some ways this may help us to see one another in compassion, and bind us together, as shared experience of support in traumatic grief often can. That is the hope, that in shared grief of what was the world we knew, we will bring more unity than division.