It really happened

On the pandemic and our need to grieve.

For centuries, but especially the past four years, something beautiful and terrible has been growing. 

Nobody seems to know quite how to name it. The culture simply doesn’t have the words.

But everybody knows it’s there. We can feel it, right down to our bone marrow. It permeates everything: swelling and spreading, putrefying and fermenting, begging to be transformed. And it can no longer be denied.

Grief.

Photos from a solitary walk to the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland, 2022.

I used to think this only referred to when someone you loved passed on. Lately, I’ve realized it’s more like part of the human, or even universal, condition. To be truly alive is to know loss, because it means you’ve known its opposite, connection—but neither is possible without love. 

Everything is a series of deaths and rebirths: the parts of our identity we pick up and leave behind as we move through different stages of growth; people who enter and leave our lives along the way; tools and practices, places and times moving in and out of our trajectory in different seasons, cyclical and reciprocal.

Even before the dawn of our species, humans and our ancestors have honored and acknowledged these cycles, coming together in communion with earthly and celestial bodies in all planes of existence to mark things ending and beginning, changing into something new. 

In other words, people are meant to grieve. In his shatteringly beautiful book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller cites examples of cultures past and present, many in Africa, where grief rituals are an essential part of life; in close-knit communities such as villages, the personal is the collective, and individual grief is seen and held by the group. The person or people most affected are supported until they have moved through the process, whether that takes days, months, or years—making the emotional empirical, confirming and affirming the heart’s rending.

But we don’t have these anymore in the Global North; at best, we have empty ceremonies without the ritual container, which includes the cultural stories that put events in context as well as: group support. In Global Northern societies, but especially America, when there is a loss, if we consciously note it at all, we say a few words, then anesthetize ourselves so we can go back to our jobs and routines as quickly as possible. There is no time or space for true bereavement, only pressure to keep producing, feeding the system that needs us numb.

But what you deny becomes your shadow, and grief will have its day, whether we choose to acknowledge its presence, or not.

We all know it’s there, slow-growing and spreading, always about to boil over. Lately, I’ve had the same conversation over and over with people across every area of my life. Talking to my friend and fellow writer, Lindsey Vodarek (whose Substack you should subscribe to, along with James Prescott’s grief-centered pub/pod), we realized we were formulating similar reflections at the same time.

The grief is bursting our hearts at the seams, but we have no clear place to put it. 

Your shadow is the accumulation of all those things that you repress and suppress, but still exert their influence on your life; far from disappearing in the darkness, they only grow. If you don’t listen, they’ll try ever-more creative ways of getting your attention, from turning into tumors and neuroses to throwing you from your bicycle and breaking your pelvis in five places, all of which have happened to me in the past decade. 

After all, as psychologist and psychic spelunker Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”

Just like we have individual shadows, we have collective ones. Usually, these are specific to that person or group, based on a trauma from a particular moment and place. But now, perhaps as never before, just about the entire species experienced the same traumatic event, everywhere in the world, at the same time. 

It was the pandemic. Remember that? 

Remember the time the whole world shut down for a year, and we couldn’t leave our houses except maybe, depending on where you were, to go for a walk? Remember when daily life felt like a zombie-apocalypse movie, where encountering a neighbor on the sidewalk stopped us cold in our tracks, our closest friends and family members potential drooling vectors for disease? Remember that time thousands of people suffocated inside their own lungs and we couldn’t visit dying relatives in the hospital; when supply chains collapsed and people went hungry while truckloads of food were dumped because some corporation couldn’t reroute its trucking lines?

Yeah, that. 

I remember it. I’ll bet you do, too.

But if you look at the landscape in America and much of the Global North today, it’s like a rerun of late 2019 (right down to the election, where I can’t even bring myself to look). It’s all got the same feeling of amorphous dread, a great and powerful sense that Something Is Not Right, only this time, we’ve already lived through the confirmation of that feeling. This time, we can try to pretend it’s not there, but the spectre of COVID-19 and all its horror and awakening lumbers among us, coming for its due.

Gaslighting is when they tell you the thing that just happened didn’t really happen. It’s a major cause of trauma in individuals, especially when an abusive parent does it to a child so that they’ll keep it quiet, perpetuating the cycle that plagues generations. 

It can make a person feel pretty crazy.

Suddenly you’re questioning your senses, your own body an unreliable witness. Am I seeing things? Hearing wrong? Surely, they can’t be denying the existence of that thing we both just lived through.

That’s not what happened. I was there.

Or was it? 

Your conscious mind may not remember, but your body does, the truth of what went down imprinted on your nervous system. As much as the government, media, and culture have tried to convince the public that we’re “getting back to normal,” as hard as they push the narrative that the pandemic was just a blip on the radar of the unstoppable march toward Progress and Exponential Growth, as much as they exploit people’s nostalgia for the Before Times, there is no going back.

It’s a collective gaslighting, a reality we’ve all been denying, but this is how trauma is born: when you’re told that the thing that just happened didn’t really happen, and are expected to pretend like everything is normal, soldiering on. As if there could ever be a return to the way things were after something like that grand schism, the cosmic divorce, the before and after of the innocence of youth, now lost. 

But when someone in a position of power tells another they have power-over that things happened their way, it’s hard to argue. The false reality becomes everybody’s narrative, and the true one gets pushed out of sight. 

Gone, but not forgotten.

It’s natural to long to return to blissful ignorance, the time before the hero(x)’s journey began. The wanderer always ignores the call to their quest in the beginning; it is only after crossing the threshold from the comfortable predictability of home to undergo trials and challenges that test their body, mind, and soul that they can approach the deepest, darkest place: the cave of the heart. Here, they discover what they’re really made of; the parts they least want to acknowledge, those exiled ones they hoped would disappear. 

But first ,you have to see them. 

And I mean really see them: picking them up and turning them around, examining every facet, each grimy nook and cranny as well as polished surface. Not only acknowledging but welcoming it all, as every element was absolutely necessary to get you where you are today. This is the work of a lifetime, and it’s never done. But it’s never too late to start.

Besides, like any archetype, the shadow contains both darkness and light. It’s the sum total of everything you’ve repressed, which includes beneficial qualities you pushed aside because they weren’t valued by the culture, or somebody shamed you for them. For example, your love of learning that made you a “nerd”; your natural effervescence that was once channeled into theater until everyone said you’d never make a living that way; being queer when your community told you those people were going to hell. 

Or perhaps it was your desire for a life outside the gray sameness of office jobs and service work; tiny lives in separate boxes; coffee breaks and happy hours; vacations where the patterns replicate in different places and you come back even emptier. The knowledge that the idea of success we’ve all been fed was an illusion designed to sustain the top 1% of societies that were never intended to be equal. 

For all the loss and horror of the pandemic, it was an awakening, too, a cataclysmic ending that was also a beginning, and it must be grieved. There was something meaningful in what we had, but it’s over now, and that’s a loss. Something newer and truer is coming, which may contain elements of what came before, but that moment can never be truly replicated. 

So let us grieve the unlived lives and those cut short; all we almost realized that never was; those promises and dreams that sailed away like spores on the wind. Yet spores always land somewhere, melding with new ecosystems and forming mycelial connections with the web of life, and so go we. 

Perhaps by holding grief rituals in our communities and countries, as Weller describes, we could continue the alchemical process the pandemic began and transform humanity’s largest collective death to date into a new, more loving culture. We have a huge opportunity to transmogrify the grief of a species into a beacon that illuminates everything sick and wrong with the old world—salvaging what we like, leaving the rest, infusing all with our own. 

It will inevitably be informed by the traditions the sick societies repressed: Black, Brown and Indigenous cultures, LGBTQIA+ and ethical non-monogamous communities, women and genderfluid people, immigrants and the otherwise othered; polycultures of all sorts. The dominant players will resist wherever possible. But once you’ve seen, you can’t unsee. Once you’ve felt, you can’t un-feel. And once we’ve grieved, perhaps we can live. 

The antidote to gaslighting is witnessing by an empathetic other: someone to tell you that yes, it really happened; no, you’re not crazy. In trauma healing, it may be a friend, therapist, or support group. And this is what grief rituals do. They open the space where we can look at each other and say:

Yes, it really happened. No, you’re not crazy. 

I was there. 

You can trust yourself. 

You’re safe.