PostPoning Grief

It was the morning of May 1^st, 2020, the year that would become completely swallowed up by the pandemic. I was up earlier than usual, booting up my laptop for the second day of remote contact tracing training at Partner’s in Health. My hands were still stained purple from the impulse dye job I’d given my hair a few nights before. Midway through a talk on the epidemiology of COVID-19, I received a text from my Dad asking me to call him later. My heart sunk into my stomach as I dialed numbly. Somehow, I knew what had happened before he even picked up.

“Grandpa Tom passed away this morning”. It was shocking given the circumstances. He’d been sick for about two months at this point but had only been hospitalized a week. We found out back in March that he had suddenly started collecting cancer diagnoses like they were on sale, despite his insistence that he felt fine and everyone was making it seem worse than it was. He started to have trouble eating and moving around. My aunt had to help clean him. My grandmother left her longtime position at the local hospital to try and keep him safe. My dad sent over shipments of toilet paper to keep them all away from crowded, understocked stores. Every development in information surrounding the pandemic made us increasingly concerned about him becoming exposed to the virus. Once he was hospitalized, he couldn’t have visitors. I asked – begged even – to see if I could go stay with family. After all, I was going to work remotely anyways, I was young, I didn’t have the health risks other family members had. But it was agreed to be too risky. After all, we had to do our part to stay home and keep others safe.

That morning was supposed to be a routine appointment. The doctors were supposed to discuss options with him about assisted living, chemotherapy, and how many months he had left. He had scheduled a meeting that afternoon with an old pal who owned the local funeral home to get his affairs in order. His had secretly contacted a partner to come pick him up from the hospital just in case the doctors and my grandmother insisted he stay longer. Instead, my grandmother got a frantic call that morning that he was fading fast. They had tested him for COVID, but we never found out his results – at that point, it didn’t really matter. They let her in with just enough time for him to squeeze her hand goodbye.

For weeks, I had worried about being able to spend time with my grandfather before he became too ill. I had woken up in a cold-sweat dreaming about sneaking into the hospital only for my entire family to get sick. My most disturbing dreams had come true. I read articles about people needing to be facetimed into hospital rooms for their loved ones last breathes, and cried for them, knowing it could have been worse. At least he wasn’t alone.

No burial. No big Irish Catholic funeral. His obituary read “A graveside service will be held at St. Joseph’s Cemetery at a future date and time to be announced.” In lieu of flowers, we asked for donations to COVID-19 relief funds. It felt unreal, like maybe I’d wake up one day to find out it was just a quarantine fever dream. Grandma returned to work in the hospital. I tried to follow her lead. I shoved my sadness down and threw myself into contact tracing. And so grief was postponed, much like all the weddings, graduations, vacations, celebrations that would have been this summer. Indefinitely postponed. It’s funny to have a “rain date” for something you don’t ever truly want to attend.

My life felt overtaken by the virus. I would spend all day calling people, informing them of their need to isolate and quarantine, checking in on their symptoms, trying to make sure they had enough supplies to stay home. I used the job to cope. I thought that if I could just focus on helping other people, it would soften the guilt I felt about not being there for him. Hearing other people on the phone share the frustration of not being able to visit or care for their own families was a sharp, deep pain. It made me relive that day all over again. I absorbed their anger, their sadness, their helplessness.

Of course, some phone calls were unbelievably painful in a different way. I remember specifically a woman who yelled the rhetoric of the administration back at me on the phone. COVID-19 was “nothing more than a bad flu” that “affected almost no one”, and she didn’t care about quarantining. It didn’t matter to her if other people got sick. It would be over soon anyways, she assured me. I hung up the phone choking back tears.

We thought we’d get to hold a funeral in June, or possibly July. Worst case, August. Now it’s approaching the end of 2020, and things have gotten irreparably worse. The distrust in health professionals and insistence of the administration on individualism over collective good deepens every day. It spreads so much like this disease, fast and unrelenting and never ending. I still can’t bring myself to do much more than go to the grocery store. It feels like the minute I sit down at a restaurant or travel out of state, I’ve admitted defeat. After all, why shouldn’t I have been there to say goodbye when the sense of urgency to protect my fellow humans would be thrown out the window no more than a few weeks later? When you have the leader of the country stand in front of cameras and claim the virus is nothing to fear, it’s hard to feel like your loved ones mattered. I can’t help but feel that all the sacrifice back in April meant nothing. Somehow, staying behind the rest of the world as it reopens and recovers makes me feel like I can give those sacrifices meaning. Like I’ve regained some sort of control in the midst of all this grief.

The pain slips out now and then. The occasional heaving sob or silent tears. I had a full-blown panic attack at one in the morning thinking about where his eyeglasses went when he was cremated, and if he knew that it was my grandmother there with him in the end. But the pandemic pushes on, and so do I. Another day of contact tracing, another day of masks and walks around the block. Another day of desperately trying to fill my life with people doing what they can to care for others and seeking out stories of communities organizing to take care of their own when larger powers fail us. And the larger powers in this country have certainly failed us.

Another day of learning to live with grief that will be processed on a date TBD.