By UJ Sandhu and Betty Lacy
Recently, a dear friend sent me John Lennon’s, “Nobody Told Me There Would Be Days Like This.” In the video, John and Yoko walk around NYC with a stethoscope and listen to the trees, monuments, a sidewalk, anything in their path. Lately, I’ve been placing the stethoscope on my own heart and listening. What I hear are some changes in rhythm. My diagnosis: Grief. It’s not an official diagnosis but one I want to name because whether we know it or not, all of us are experiencing grief.
Just a few days before the mass closures and sheltering in mandates, my mother passed away from Alzheimer’s disease. Despite knowing death was the final outcome of this disease and wishing it would happen as Mom slowly faded, I was not ready for the grief that came over me like an unexpected tsunami. My vitality hit an all-time low, I wanted to do nothing except sit and stare out the window, and I was, still am, irritable and lack tolerance. Being a physician, jumping into help has been my MO. Yet my energy was gone. A friend helped me realize, I was not only grieving my mother, but the isolation imposed by Covid-19, and the inability to respond in my usual way.
Grief is a large topic that covers many kinds of losses and an infinite range of emotions, fear, anxiety, and depression to name a few. The most basic definition of grief is the normal and natural emotional reaction to loss or change of any kind. We all qualify for loss and change of many kinds in our new sheltered world, but how many of us attribute it to grief? This year Passover and Easter were not held in typical large family gatherings. Likewise, other celebrations such as birthdays, weddings, funerals, concerts, graduations all canceled. The Grief Recovery Method, an online blog, displays a poster that says: Grief is an emotional experience and no matter how hard society tries to act as if sad feelings don’t exist – THEY DO! Americans, with our tightly woven cultural individualism, particularly struggle with admitting vulnerability preferring to keep a façade of composure or worse bravado and hubris. We resist feelings. And we don’t want to name them because… we’re in denial, the first stage of grief.
It was Elisabeth Kubler Ross who first described five stages of grief: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression, Acceptance. I remember taking a workshop with her as a freshman nursing student. I spent much of the day in tears, witnessing stories of children affected by cancer. It led me to recognize “helpless” feelings I had sequestered from my own childhood. It wasn’t till later in life when I made an important connection. I was drawn to help others as a conduit to healing my own losses and pain. When I started naming my losses, I began to heal.
Tara Brach, a Buddhist teacher, describes ways to begin healing from loss and grief in her online “Shelter in Love” series. She uses the acronym RAIN-to invite the Recognition of emotions, Allowing them, Investigating them in the body, and Nurturing them. She explains, “ It is no longer survival of the fittest but the survival of the nurtured”.
As the planet is showing signs of regeneration, with animals and fish returning to occupy areas where cars and people once did, we have an opportunity to pay attention to ourselves and our communities. When we sequester ourselves and allow solitude, moments of contentment will come from being quiet. Our son and partner, planted a flower garden in Brooklyn last week, my quilt sisters are mask making, sidewalk art has returned throughout our valley. Even if we feel stir crazy and want to distract with Netflix or you-tube videos, there will be moments of quiet and moments of nurturing. Neuroscientists call this kind of attention widening the window of tolerance. If we walk alongside John and Yoko, we can listen with our very own inner stethoscope taking note of our heart, naming our emotions, investigating them in our body and nurturing ourselves. If you choose you can sing “Imagine,” as we walk together, physically distanced but socially connected.
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April 24, 2020 at 02:25AM
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