How, Then, Shall We Mourn?
I’ve been grieving hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, the growing assembly of those who could not survive the COVID virus. We add a few thousand a day.
We don’t really know what to do with the dead. There’s no Arlington National Cemetery where families can gather and the dead can remain behind. Some of COVID’s dead are now ashes lovingly carried in a broach or an urn. Some have been stored in refrigerated trucks until it’s clear no one is coming to claim them. Some are going into unmarked pauper graves dug alongside toxic waste dumps. It’s all unthinkable.
There are screeds about people who wear masks, or don’t; stories about risks that justify staying at home; essays on what leadership should have done, but didn’t, in the opening weeks of this tragedy. We’re encouraged to plot personal strategies to stay safe. I get it. We write for the living, not the dead. But at some point we need to look up and out, away from ourselves, to reckon with the national calamity, the immensity of hundreds of thousands of lives that were, last year at this time, being lived to the full.
I worry that we’re making the pandemic into a single story about 281,186 deaths, and that’s a deadly mistake. It isn’t one story. It’s 281,186 unique stories, each one different from the next, stories of mothers and strangers, sinners and saints.
Part of our confusion is found in the difference between grief and mourning. Grief is my personal emotion, my feeling of hopeless loss. It’s what I felt when my mother died. Mourning is the collective, communal expression of that grief, the shared crying out for what or who we’ve lost. The pandemic has sent hundreds of thousands of loved ones into the depths of personal grief. But what do we know of communal mourning, of stepping into the public arena where others will hold us, embrace us, tell us they know our pain because, in truth, they do? We have grief aplenty in this plague, but where is the communal mourning?
Thirty years ago, the American AIDS community came together around another virus. I was there. I watched as apartments were converted into hospices. We wore red ribbons to express our solidarity. As the number of dead mounted, we wove a quilt remembering their names and telling their stories. We marched together carrying candles. We sang songs of protest and of sorrow. We hugged and shuddered and wept. As privately as we had grieved, so publicly did we mourn.
But in this generation’s epidemic, grief staggers individuals but does not translate to communal mourning. Even on Zoom, there’s no suggested ritual that unites us. The idea of a community that rallies to comfort the grieving has remained an idea. In fact, our communities have been so politicized and polarized, so torn apart, that even our dead cannot bring us together. We have no way to mourn.
President-elect Joe Biden offers the image of the empty chair — the chair his son Beau would have occupied had he lived. I’m grateful for his great empathy, borne of his own great grief, but no one sees an empty chair when we’re forbidden to gather for dinners.
We need something small and simple, something we can wear or do that unites us all. We need a symbol by which to identify with the dead and dying, and especially with those who are quietly grieving. We need a signal that says “we see you, we know and we care.”
Therapist Erin Coriell says that “if we are unable to grieve in community, it is nearly impossible for individuals to fully heal. Grief demands to be heard. It is this grieving thing that makes us human; it is what unites us all at our core.”
If we’re to be fully human, we must learn again to mourn. As badly as we need a vaccine to stay alive, we need mourning to be human. We need rituals, and symbols, and communities where grief turns to mourning, and mourning leads, however imperfectly, to comfort.
