In March of 2020, I had three part-time jobs while my kiddos were at school. I taught yoga a few times a week, I worked at Fleet Feet, a running shoe store near my house, and I worked in a school office one day a week. I had connections at all three of those jobs. Communities of people, people that I loved.
I haven’t been back since, and now I realize, I never will.
My children went to school on a Friday and did not go back to school again. There were no end of year parties, no tearful goodbyes with their classroom teachers and classmates. My older kid didn’t go to junior prom or get his yearbook signed by his friends. All over the country there were missed graduations, proms, and entire spring sport seasons. Kids did not clean out their lockers and desks, did not sing the final school song in the gym on the last day of school. There were no popsicles on the playground, no end of the year spring dance or piano recital.
We had no closure.
There is grief in all of this. Grief that we may not recognize as such. Because why should we be sad about our losses when there are bigger ones happening every day?
People are getting sick (really sick). There are lost jobs, lost homes and lost lives. Families that cannot say goodbye to loved ones as they leave this earth. Some are leaving because of COVID-19, some are leaving because people die of other causes.
There are no funerals for those who are lost.
There is no closure.
How do we move forward from here? How do we maintain our relationships and communities when the physical locations of those communities are no longer there? How do we continue to make connections with others on a regular basis in order to protect and promote our mental health? How do we keep ourselves from losing our ever loving minds when we cannot conceptualize how things will ever be different than they are right now?
We fight about masks.
Because it is easier to fight about something than to stop and feel our grief. It is easier to feel righteous indignation DEEPLY over what someone else is doing wrong than to grieve the things we have lost, big and small. How do we grieve the things we lost when we as a country do not understand or recognize our own feelings?
This month I made the choice not to come back to my part-time jobs, mostly because I do not know when they will be safe again. Next month I am starting a new chapter in my life as I go back to school to pursue a Masters degree. I think I’ll be busy enough with school and being with my kids to hold onto those jobs anyway.
I know this is absolutely the right path for me. And yet, it’s sad and scary to move forward and leave behind a life that I really really loved. I really love and miss the people that I will no longer see. I’m sad I never got to say goodbye. I’m sad there was no closure.
There is grief in moving forward to an unknown future when you’ve lost a life that you did not want to leave.
There is grief in losing months of our lives in what is the usual rhythm of life to a virus that we don’t really understand. But move forward we will, every single one of us. The question is, how will we do it? We may feel broken, exhausted, and a little hopeless (at least some days). There is a collective grief that every one of us is carrying. Can we have compassion for ourselves and one another as we learn to move on?
Life will never ever be the same. We have all been changed by our experiences. And these experiences have affected every one of us in different and profound ways. My hope is that we can see the changes that have occurred in every person, including ourselves. My hope is that we can meet and have compassion for the pain that has been endured.
Just take a deep breath and give it a try.
if your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete
-buddha
