Covid and Grief: Reflecting on 2 Years of a Pandemic

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COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on all of us. Whether you’re mourning a COVID-related death or just a way of life (remember what it was like before masks and quarantines?), the past two years have caused a tremendous amount of disruption. 

For many of us, they’ve also caused significant grief.

Though grief can be a difficult emotion, it can also be instrumental in helping us move on from the past and adapt to a “new normal.” When we learn to recognize grief in its many different forms, we can move through it with acceptance and grace. 

Recognizing Grief

Grief most commonly occurs after the death of a loved one, but it can be triggered by other, smaller losses too. Moving to a new city, experiencing a break-up, or readjusting expectations about the future may cause grief, too. 

Other events that may trigger grief 

  • Moving

  • Divorce or break-up

  • Career setback

  • Infertility or miscarriage

  • Empty nest after adult children leave the home

  • Retirement

Grief and COVID 

Many people have lost friends, neighbors, and family members to COVID. But even those of us who have been lucky enough not to lose a loved one are still dealing with different kinds of grief. We’ve seen our world turned upside down, and even if we haven’t experienced trauma first-hand, we’ve witnessed it in the constant barrage of bad news. 

Beyond that, we’ve also experienced huge changes in our way of life. Maybe we don’t identify the feeling as grief, but many of us have been missing what we used to take for granted: visiting our children’s classroom, going to see a summer blockbuster in a crowded theater, or simply enjoying a conversation without the minor annoyance of masks. 

These losses may seem minor, but once you add them all up, it’s quite a different world that we find ourselves in. It’s important to recognize grief and to give yourself permission to experience these feelings of sadness and loss. 

Other forms of COVID-related grief:

  • Losing a job 

  • Experiencing isolation and the loss of social gatherings

  • Loss of social supports like daycare, place of worship, and school 

  • Witnessing loss of life and trauma, whether in healthcare or caregiver roles 

  • Losing free time 

  • Losing functionality due to “long haul” COVID symptoms

What Does Grief Look Like for You? 

Grief can take as many different forms as the number of people who experience it. Most of us are familiar with the five stages of grief, but these stages don’t always go in order or look how we expect them to. This is especially true for COVID grief, which isn’t always related to the loss of a specific person (although it can be). COVID grief may also be hard to identify since, like the COVID-19 variants themselves, it comes in waves and never seems to fully resolve. 

The classic five stages of grief are: 

  • Shock and denial

  • Anger 

  • Bargaining

  • Depression

  • Acceptance

Again, some people may experience these stages out of order or skip some altogether. For some, grief may look completely different. Their grief may take the form of exhaustion, difficulty concentrating, insomnia, guilt, or loss of appetite. Whatever form your grief takes, a trained therapist can help you identify and cope with your symptoms. 

The Great Pause: A Time to Reflect

As challenging as grief can be, the process of grieving something or someone can help us move past the loss and accept the reality of our new circumstances. In a world transformed by COVID, for example, we’re learning to adjust to a new way of living and let go of our expectations about how things used to function.

The periods of lockdown especially gave many of us time to reflect on what truly matters to us. Taking a pause from jobs, school, social duties, and daily commutes allowed us to reassess our priorities. Is the 30 minute drive to the office worth it? Do we really like this job we’ve been doing for the past five years? Do we like homeschooling our kids or are we ready to send them back?

Processing our grief over the old way of life can leave us with greater clarity about how we want to move forward. 

Onward: Setting Intentions and Moving Forward

Hopefully the pandemic has helped us discern what we want for this next phase of life. As we continue to hope for some degree of normalcy, things may never look quite the same as before the pandemic. 

But we’re not quite the same people either. 

The pandemic has helped us decide what’s important to us and what’s not. Maybe we know that we derive lots of joy from baking our own bread or that we need to carefully limit our news intake to feel our best. Maybe we’ve realized it’s time for a career change or a new relationship. 

How a Therapist Can Help 

Whatever changes you’re making, a therapist can help you adapt to the “new normal.” You may need support dealing with anxiety while venturing back out into the world, even knowing that you can never eliminate all risks. They can also help if you’re struggling with isolation, depression, or extended grief due to the hardships of the pandemic. 

Your therapist will work with you to implement coping mechanisms so you can live with purpose and intention in this new phase of life.