Life in the days of COVID-19: Relating with trauma and grief

When the Coronavirus first started making its way to the United States, I was just emerging from a year-long, deep and dark cycle of depression. In 2019 I lost two girls, one at 21 weeks and another at 16 weeks. What they say it true: nothing can prepare you for the impact of losing a child. Your world is just completely blurry, and to compound my own personal experience, I had already worked for over a year through body trauma, triggers, etc., just from the THOUGHT that I might get pregnant.

So to have fought so bravely, to have jumped into EMDR (a surfacing treatment for PTSD), and then to have lost, to have failed, to have gone to the hospital, undergone surgery and to come home without either of my babes in my arms? Yeah, I was rattled. It tore me apart. And it made me look very seriously at what the hell I had been doing with my life up until that point.

The thing about Grief is that you can’t fake it. You have to walk through it. You can try to dismiss it through mental tactics or even “positive message” yourself with distractions. But Grief is a life experience with very specific paths, each as individual as the person who’s walking through it. For me, looking back now, I can see there were certain shifts and milestones that occurred in my mind and body while grief did Her work. 

When working with trauma and Grief, we must first “sit with it”

The first was the “sit with it” phase. This phase is the first and the one that’s constantly emerging in different flavors because Grief requires (demands even) that we look Her straight in the eye. No shifting, no pretending, no shirking. She does not take kindly to someone trying to make her sparkly or light or cute. She is Grief, and She has a force of Her own. To fight Her is to fight your own healing and recovery. She stood in my room every night for weeks, months even, gently looking at me and reminding me, “You have to sit here with Me. You can’t run away.”

The more I learned to sit with Her, I felt some of my basic functioning skills return. You know, things like eating, doing the dishes, walking the dogs. These things weren’t light and sparkly like fairy dust, but they were no longer utterly impossible. Functioning felt like a small miracle, even though it was taking more energy than I could have ever imagined. It served as a touch point for me as Grief began to send me some straight talk about who I am and where I’m going from here. In the same breath that I felt utterly useless (hello, depression) and worried I’d never be the same again (hello, anxiety), I could use my functioning as a way to remind myself: We might not be running the New York City marathon, but at least we made a sandwich. 

After trauma, there is no “normal” to return to

Another phase showed up along the way: it was the “If I can just return to normal, everything will be better.” This is comical because anyone who’s been through life-shattering grief knows that there is no turning back the clock. You can’t just pretend something traumatic didn’t happen. It did happen, it had an effect and it is your sack cloth of experience to carry now. I tried returning to my old self (“I’ll just do a little marketing work on the side!”) but stepping even one inch toward my former career made my body shut down. She was NOT having it. She was sending me clear messages 24/7: “We can’t go back there. We’re not there anymore.” God, that was maddening for a fix-it-quicker in remission.

Through all these phases, I had to do a handful of things. First, I had to get clear on whether or not I could accept the messages that life had brought me. That through pain and suffering, I had been broken but also mended into something stronger. That Grief is a companion in my life who tenderly (and sometimes wrathfully) keeps track of the reality: that I am transformed and renewed because of my loss … and all loss requires grieving, oftentimes over and over again. I also had to reach deep inside myself to figure out where I was really going to go next, if “emerging” from this depression and trauma was really possible (I didn’t know!).

Your body is on your side and trying to communicate with you

It turns out, my body was trying to communicate with me all along. Our bodies are great messengers because they don’t get caught up in rational thought processes when something happens to them—they just respond instinctively. “Ouch that hurt,” or “That food was hot on my tongue—spit it out!” So I turned inward and realized that I had been suffocating my body’s messages. And these messages felt REALLY strange, too. I had this inexplicable urge to send presents to everyone I knew. I wanted to try every new body wash, face serum, exfoliating scrub and perfume sample. And then I wanted to share them all with everyone in my life who loves skincare and self-pampering. Looking back now, I can see that my body was telling me to get some sensory stuff moving. It seemed pretty obvious to me, so much so that I laughed a bit.

Of course: when we engage any of the five senses, it creates a sort of fork in the neural train track where anxiety and depression can often run amok and unchecked. Scrub your hands with an exfoliating bar soap? Fork in the track! Take a deep breath of a rose-scented body spray? Fork in the track! I think you see where I’m going. Soon my bathroom sink was filled with opportunities to interject into my anxiety and depression thought patterns, and I began to feel a small bit of happiness and deep, abiding energy and hopefulness again. (Disclaimer: perfume did not “cure” my depression, but these sensory experiences provided a way to first honor my body’s messages and then deeply embrace a “fork” in the anxiety track I live with most days.)

Trauma, Grief and relating with life after two months with Coronavirus

So what does this all have to do with COVID-19? Everything. It has everything to do with this force of nature called a global pandemic thrusting every last one of us into some sort of trauma response. I remember feeling empowered and also completely gutted when I realized that everyone on planet Earth was now experiencing what I’ve been walking through for the past year. The utter confusion and pain of life changing in an instant with no guarantee of when “normal” will return; the panic and anxiety of all our security blankets like schedules, routines, help around the house, etc. disappearing; and the Grief that naturally follows as we mourn the loss of life as we knew it before Coronavirus turned everything upside down.

One of the things that losing a child naturally stirred up in me was the feeling of being completely and utterly alone and without a cure—I was the only person in the entire world who felt my baby girls kick or move; my pain was deep, personal and I was the only one who felt it so acutely. The same goes for trauma in our lives as we band together to fight the spread of COVID-19: it sinks deep down in a way that most of us have no way of relating to. It’s a really horrible experience: to be grieving loss, to be disoriented, to be without resources—and to feel completely alone.

However, you’re not alone. In the first few weeks of everyone shifting to life under shelter-in-place rules, wearing face masks, washing their hands copiously, we all found ways to remember a living truth: we are interconnected. We all share a commonality: we are human beings and we long for connection, we long to comfort those we love when they’re scared or tired or sick. We long to reach out and be present for people who are supporting us directly or indirectly. 

We can emerge again; everything is workable

And so this is my love note to the whole entire world: we are all living through a collective trauma and this will take time to heal. We will all be faced with the opportunity to either sink back into our old patterns or open gently to the messages that Grief naturally brings along with Her. There is no “normal” to return to, but there is a collective care and compassion that will carry us through to the days when we can safely host large dinner parties and Fourth of July celebrations.

And finally, I can’t stress this enough: there is a way to work with every single thing you’re feeling—not to stuff it away or shrug it off or wait for it to disappear.

Everything is workable here.

I am living proof that we can be gutted with the unthinkable, and we can thrive again. It might look different from what we’re used to, but it’s also quite likely that one day you’ll look back and realize that it brought you to a place of deeper compassion, resourcefulness and perspective. Until that day comes, you and I, we’ll be in this together.