The Collective Grief of COVID-19: How Do We Recover From the Things We Have Lost?

On the 24th of March, Jessica Walter died. I was swamped with things to do – emails to send and a long to-do list. What’s more, my mind was stricken with distractions and in its third disgruntled lockdown. When I saw the headline I was struck with a sudden sadness. I’m not, by any means, a Jessica Walter fan, but there was a strange elusive connection between Jessica Walter and my late mother. 

I found myself boiling the kettle and sitting down late that night and writing some prose about her death. It was a rubbish piece, I know I’ve done better, but I did like the one line ‘it’s not that someone famous died but because they remind you of home.’ Me and my Mother would spend regular evenings in her house watching Play Misty For Me, a film released in 1971. The film itself is in some ways considered a classic – it captures the mystifying era of late 60’s horror. But it’s also a terrible portrayal of a woman on a killing rampage after she is scorned by 60s Clint Eastwood and his rejection. The reason me and my mother would sit and watch Play Misty For Me was to laugh. We’d rummage through the old and dusty videotape cupboard and find the cracked box, open it up and belly laugh at the characters and their ridiculous portrayals. The film is set in Carmel-by-the-Sea in California which even motivated me and my mother to take a trip out there on a shoestring budget to see the California coast.

In March, when I felt this news eclipsing into a feeling of sadness, a tiny semblance of grief, I was tapping into a larger feeling of connection. I felt that in some strange way, Jessica Walter dying was the death of a connection to my mother, but the reality is, that it was the confrontation of the loss of a tradition. 

In normal circumstances, it might be that I was commuting, or in a bar as the news was passed between conversations, but in the banality of my apartment, the apartment I’ve spent too long in, the tiniest of things felt potent. I felt the loss and spent the evening writing, or discussing it with my partner. He suggested we play out the tradition together and watch the film to commemorate her, but I just wanted to sit with it for a little while longer. 

In 2018, I lost my mother to metastatic breast cancer. Her sudden death came at a time when things seemed to be getting better. It was a horrible year for me, and nothing in life prepares you for sudden death. I did have time to process things, but I don’t think I necessarily had time to sit with them. Deaths like these take years to recover from and when the first lockdown hit, I was hit with grief again, but in a different way. I was stuck inside like everybody else, but I think it was the quick stopping of life that made me confront it. I did some therapy, over zoom – which was very much a faded return to some feelings, but the best way I processed it was through writing and creating. I gave myself time to create and work through the feelings I had wrapped up and locked away. Loss hit me during the pandemic like a two-year delayed train. 

One of the things I noticed though, through the processing of loss, was that it was going on all around me. On a mass scale. When you are grieving you often feel like no one understands the feelings you go through – grief is starkly unique and as lives flutter on around you – you feel you have stalled. But my grief, and the creativity that came from it, felt different. 

A lot of people have lost things because of Covid-19. There’s the obvious, the death of loved ones caused directly by the virus, but there have been huge amounts of other types of loss. People have lost relationships, jobs, and routines. There is a collective feeling of loss and sadness. This has its negative impacts. Feelings of loneliness are at an all-time high. People feel disconnected from the world and due to isolation, they might even feel disconnected from themselves. The question so ensues, what do we do with this?

Author Jeanette Winterson wrote one of my favourite quotes in Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal – ‘All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others.’ The joy that comes from this quote is its suggestion that through language we can get our voice back. For Winterson, she says we can turn to the poem or the book. But there is also the hint here that we can turn to each other. There are people who know exactly how to describe what you’re feeling. Connecting with those people will bring an undeniable sense of community – you will get your voice back.

As a writer, my approach has always been to confront grief in my work. When I started sharing this work online, people responded to it much more than they ever would have if not for the pandemic. I strongly believe that’s because more people have time to listen, but I also believe people can empathise because of their own respective loss. Grief can come in many strange shapes and colours, but I’m not sure everyone has realised it came as a collective grey cloud during Covid-19. How many times is it that we can feel so much empathy for someone's loss on a collective scale? It was more than someone famous dying like Jessica Walter, it was the death of the collective normality. 

Recovering from a loss like this takes time. Lots of time. We have all lost something this year. It is through connecting with each other, relating our struggles, and exploring them, that I believe we will be able to work through the trauma we will carry around with us, after the pandemic. The experiences will not be a we’re back to normal but instead a feeling that we are trying to heal a wound, together. 

When there is a life without restriction, it is through speaking to each other, that we will truly be able to get our voice back. I hope to find myself, in a couple of months, swirling around my spoon in a latte in some far-off coffee shop with an itinerary full of fun things to do and friends to see. I hope that we will tip our coffees to each other in the knowledge that we both got through whatever loss we experienced together. It will be like a tiny gust of wind passing, not six inches of snow to shake off. It will be a distant echo, that we can all pull something from and articulate together.

We will weave recovery together, through connection.