“Grief is the jumble of emotions we feel when an established pattern changes or ends”

Can you begin to count the number of times that covid has changed your life in the last two years? From things as small as missing coffee with friends to the catastrophic losses of jobs, family and loved ones.  Our world has changed and we are grieving.

Before the arrival of covid when one of us was grieving there were others around who weren’t feeling loss and we leaned on them to help us through.  When grief hit we coped in part, by relying on the strength of those who were whole.  But all that changed when covid arrived because covid hit everyone at once.  Suddenly people everywhere were scared, bored, outraged and grieving and we had no one left to lean on.

Grief became the default emotional state and grieving became our new normal.

Although we’ve all been effected by covid’s rampage, each of us has felt the disruption in our own unique ways.  Depending on your age, sex, race and situation, your experience of covid would have been just a little different from everyone else’s and that has made for a strange and unique form of covid loneliness.  We’re all in this together but feel very far apart and we grieve the connectedness we’ve lost.

There is no question that covid has changed our world.  We’ve lost touch with routines that used to ground us and ceremonies that used to lift us up.  As we close out this second year of living with covid many folks are feeling the loss of certainty about what comes next.  The loss of a known or even somewhat predictable future brings more grief.

Whether your grief comes from the loss of people and things you’ve loved or the dreams you had for a future that now seems out of reach, your feelings are real.  Be respectful of your feelings and gentle with yourself.

Grief is a normal human reaction to change.

Covid has brought so much change that grief has become our new normal.

Written by Catherine Mitchell, Certified Grief Recovery Specialist serving the Durham Region.