Ohio Governor Mike Dewine announced this week that schools would remain closed through at least May 1, for us to continue sheltering in place. I told my 8-year-old and he promptly sat down with an emphatic sigh. Then he said, “No, I want to go back to school,” and put in his head in hand. He’s grieving.
Aren’t we all? If there’s one thing that’s bringing many of us together right now, it’s the simple fact that we’re all grieving something. I’ve been thinking hard about it, and I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t lost something in this nearly global shutdown. We grieve loss – in whatever shape in comes in. For an 8-year-old, and most other school-age children, the loss of time at school is major. They don’t know much else. Their normalcy has been ripped out from under them suddenly.
Naturally, that means the teachers that have invested in them and that they grew so close to are suddenly gone. The friends that they learn and play with are gone. The routine is gone. My older son cried when he learned that his Little League baseball season was slipping away. Other children are missing out on the chance to have birthday parties and lessons for their favorite activities. While many activities seem superfluous during our normal lives, they loom larger when the loss dominates our days.
As parents, we grieve the experiences our children will miss. I grieve the time they don’t get to spend in normal childhood. The loss of school activities, sports or proms may not seem like much in comparison to the severity of a New York City ICU room right now, however, these common building blocks of childhood are rites of passage in many ways. To the children who lose something they will never get back and the parents who must help them cope, this is plenty substantial.
Some of us are grieving trips we now can’t take. Church services we can’t attend. Shows and games we now can’t see. Time originally booked to visit with friends and family that has been stolen. Others are grieving job and financial losses. We grieve the time we can’t spend with relatives who are sick or quarantined in an effort to keep them from getting sick. There are frontline workers who grieve not being able to hug their children or spouses for fear of spreading the virus.
We collectively grieve the sudden loss of normal existence. The loss of freedom. The ability to go about our lives freely without concern of our very movements putting someone in life-threatening danger is a tough pill to swallow. Grief, no matter what’s causing it, is hard. And our own is the hardest to stomach.
Writing about grief isn’t exactly fun. It’s heavy and must be done carefully. And today I think that it’s necessary.
First, I want you to know that you are not alone in experiencing this grief. I realize that doesn’t make anything go away, and your circumstances are unique to you, but I hope it helps in a small way to know that most of us understand because we’re experiencing some, too. It’s all right to go ahead and grieve. In fact, we should. We can’t really process it all until we let it out. I’ve heard it said that you have to feel it to heal it. In my experience, that’s been true.
Don’t feel guilty about having a wide range of emotions or not be able to control them. Don’t feel guilty about not being able to understand them. Just let them out. I’m not going to give you a bunch of trite expressions here. After all, my only qualifications are that I’m feeling them, too. This hurts. It’s causing pain for most people I know. Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy fix.
Secondly, the only way to get to the other side of grief is to go through it. There are no bypasses. When my Mom died a former co-worker who had lost his mother, was the first person to tell me that you eventually begin to experience the “new normal.” I’ve heard that a million times since then. I’ve said it. I’ve experienced it. The person or the exact time and experience that we’ve lost can’t be replaced. We can’t get the time back once it is gone. There is no getting back this season’s activities or these weeks of school. But time will pass and so will this pandemic.
Children will move on to a new school year and new seasons. We will get through this and a new normal will emerge. I pray we can make it a new normal that was worth the sacrifice of what we’ve each lost. I pray that individually we can come out of it as better people and collectively that humanity is better.
I pray that we will have a better appreciation for the things that perhaps we had been taking for granted. It’s true that most of us don’t realize what we have until it’s gone. May we go forward with an improved understanding of the value of human connection and the significance of just how interdependent we actually are. May we learn to prioritize those parts of life that carry lasting value – chief among them, faith, hope and love.
Finally, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t offer a little hope anyway. If you’re a regular reader, you probably know where this is going. If you’re reading my words for the first time let me tell you that my hope comes 100 percent from Jesus Christ, and the faith I have in Him. Psalm 34:18 tells us that the Lord is near the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
It sure feels like there are plenty of us right now that have had our hearts broken or spirits crushed. I am sorry. Let me encourage you to trust that the Lord is near, and that He is walking us through this wilderness in ways that we can’t fully realize until we reach the other side. I have gone through enough grief in my life to know that there is another side. We’ll be changed by the time we get there, but we will get there.
Friends the only way out of grief is through it. Even if we’re apart, at least we’re in it together.
