Did the Virus Prepare Me for Loss? – Charlotte Magazine

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In February of 2020, just over a month before my ordinary life transformed, I began a journey with grief. As I walked a wooded trail draped in near-silence, a breeze shifted the branches, occasionally loosening a leftover leaf from its home. In this space of quietude, words came to me that would shape my future: You don’t know how to grieve your losses. A phrase as soft as the sound of a squirrel scuttling up a tree.

As a perpetual optimist, I searched for silver linings rather than allowing myself to feel hard emotions I’d rather avoid. Patrice, you don’t know how to grieve your losses, the epiphany declared to me. For reasons I could not then articulate, I discovered I wanted to learn.

The pandemic. I think most of us can name a day when the growing fear and concern about COVID stepped beyond the headlines and met us in our everyday lives. Mine was the March day when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools sent children home. What we thought might be a handful of weeks merged into the chaotic rhythm of an unimagined daily life.

By the time my children began virtual school in our living room, I had been on my journey of learning how to grieve for a little more than a month. There were tasks I had given myself in that month that might help me observe the impact loss had on my body and emotions. I rewatched sad scenes from movies and paused to consider why I cried at those moments. Upon a wise friend’s suggestion, I began to keep a lament journal. Every evening, I listed three items that made me mourn and invited me to lament. The opposite of a gratitude journal, I explained to anyone willing to listen. I constructed a list of 20 moments of loss in my life. Each day, I spent a few minutes reflecting on one of those memories and letting myself feel the heaviness in my chest and the ache in my heart I was prone to push away. And somehow with each lament, each sad scene, each memory of loss, my capacity to recognize how grief manifested within me seemed to grow—perhaps exponentially so.

I look back now and wonder if that phrase was preparation for what would soon come. That somehow, I would be ready for the mid-March shelter-in-place orders that would steal much of the life I had been living. That I would be ready for the end of May, when the headlines pounded with George Floyd’s murder and the weight of sorrow would consume me, a weight of sorrow for Mr. Floyd and a weight of sorrow rooted in a far more ancient grief for the age-old devaluation of Black life. That somehow, I would be ready for December, when my father would tell me that my grandmother had contracted COVID. Less than a week later, his early-morning phone call would tug me out of sleep with news of my grandmother’s death. My howl would wake my children as I thought of my grandmother fading from life. Did anyone hold her hand? I would say to myself, my breath shortening each time I thought of her dying alone.

Of course, the truth is, despite all my efforts, I wasn’t ready for any of those moments. Can a person really be “ready” to face loss? But I believe embarking on my journey with grief enabled me to mourn such heartache—instead of fleeing toward false promises of what might uplift instead. Is it better to feel heartache rather than flee? I can’t say for sure. What I can say, though, is that we build our lives amid a multitude of losses. We may try, but we cannot escape this truth. To avoid grief is, perhaps, to avoid a part of who we are.

It’s been four years since the reality of the pandemic broke into my life. It’s been four years since the arrival of words in the woods that would reshape my view of the world. Last autumn has come and gone, a season that reminds me of what we lose. We are now in the presence of spring, anticipating all that might emerge. On the other side of these four years, I am able to dwell within moments more like autumn’s sad lullaby rather than spring’s joy. I find myself inclined to pause and notice, to name and witness, to mourn and grieve the losses—the countless losses—that exist. I don’t know if the pandemic changed me, but I know I have been changed in this pandemic.

PATRICE GOPO is an award-winning essayist and the author of several books, including her most recent, Autumn Song: Essays on Absence. 

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Patrice Gopo

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