Days of the Virus: The Cost of Paradox

You know, I'd rather see this on TV.  
Tones it down.
- Laurie Anderson, from "Sharkey's Day" on the album Mister Heartbreak

I'm very fortunate.  As I've described elsewhere, I live in an easily protected place with family I care about and get along with and am able to continue my work.  By almost any standard outside the US, I am wealthy (in the US, I'm solidly middle-class).  My house is in a safe neighborhood; I have nice toys; my family has plenty to eat and we get both our groceries and takeout delivered.  We are all reasonably healthy for our age and able to care for ourselves and each other.  We are about as well set up to weather the pandemic as could be wished. 

In contrast, am also free of many risks and stresses.  I don't have to make my living doing things that regularly expose me, and therefore the rest of my family, to the SARS-Cov-2 virus.  I'm not working in a hospital, retirement or nursing home, or dentist's office; I'm not a police, firefighter, EMT, or other first responder.  I don't work in a grocery store and I don't deliver groceries, takeout, or packages.  I'm also not unemployed:  I'm not a restauranteur or server or cook; I'm not an artist or performer; I'm not a retailer.  I'm also not homeless nor am I living in a crowded, underserved and over-policed neighborhood lacking basic infrastructure services.  As of this writing, no one in my family or network of friends or in my patient caseload has died of COVID-19. 

For all these reasons and more, I consider myself and my family lucky.  And therein lay a problem. 

As I've been chronicling in this series, the pandemic has been difficult.  The loss of physical contact, of variety and novelty, the ongoing uncertainty and fear of dying or of someone close dying -- all these are things that normally cause pain and would be normal to grieve.  In a normal world, when we suffer a loss, our family and friends rally around us for support; they witness our pain and tell us it will be okay and reassure us that they are and will always be here for us.  They can do that because it's very likely that they are not suffering a similar loss at the same time.  Conversely, we, who are in pain, feel free to be so because we know our pain, relative to our loved ones in that moment, is significant. 

That's not true now.  The burnout, depression, anger, disorientation, etc., that any one of us is experiencing right now, while significant on the scale of things, is not greatly different from most others in our community.  Everyone is struggling, laboring under deficits imposed by the pandemic. 

Grief -- the process we go through when the world changes around us -- requires permission, welcome.  To grieve, we must accept our grief, the pain of it, the inconvenience of it, allow it to bubble up and wash over us when it chooses to.  In grieving, our bodies and our minds process the losses and accustom us to this new world, absent of the things or people we lost and different from the world before. 

The ubiquity of loss and grief in a pandemic -- it is a pandemic after all -- makes this permission difficult.  How can I "complain" about how hard it is when there are people dying alone in plastic isolation bubbles with no more human comfort than an iPad screen can provide?  How can I "indulge" my anger or sadness at my lost privileges like a private office and a gym membership when folks in my city have no safe shelter of their own, let alone safety from the virus? 

To be able to grieve in times like this requires we tolerate this paradox.  It is true that I am very fortunate; it is true that others suffer horribly.  Yet those truths do not make my suffering untrue.  If I am to be well, both for my own sake and so that I may be of service to others who suffer beside me, I must grieve my loss, feel my pain. 

This is what is required of us:  to grant ourselves our pain.  Humans' greatest strength is community (even if Americans aren't especially good at it).  Not only do we serve each other better when we can accept our own grief, but we grieve best when we grieve together.  In permitting ourselves to be in pain, we permit each other; in permitting each other, we permit ourselves.  And with permission, we can grieve and disencumber ourselves and be of service.