Marinating in Exhaustion
Remember when toilet paper was gold? Our biggest complaints back in early 2020 were food hoarders, grocery checkout lines snaking through the insides of the store, and the absence of our favorite brand of toilet paper (or any at all). Remember that? You’d drive around to three or four supermarkets trying to find something, anything, to wipe your family’s bums. You might end up snagging a 4-pack of single-ply at the gas station across town.
Ah, the good old days.
By now, many of us have lost loved ones to COVID, suffered extended destruction of our sense of taste and smell, or endured our own forms of trauma brought on by the overwhelmingness of this pandemic. Some of us, however, are still in the denial stage of this coronavirus. For those of you starting to accept the fact that maybe the scientists know what they’re talking about after all, anger comes next, my friends.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, renowned psychiatrist and researcher on the subject of death and dying, established five stages of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Many of us, when we moved from anger, headed straight into bargaining. What do you mean all summer events are canceled? Fuck that shit! I spent good money on these tickets. Will they hold the events later? Maybe in the fall. No way I’m losing what I paid for these. Do you think they’ll refund us? Many of us jumped on flights going anywhere, took our chances—those deep discounts too good to miss. We took all kinds of chances.
We didn’t know what we didn’t know.
Now many of us find ourselves smack in the middle of the depression stage—overachievers in grieving. Kübler-Ross is clear in the fact that we don’t necessarily pass through the stages in straight progression. We might experience a few steps all at once or back up to stages we’ve already seen. Raise your hand if you feel angry at those who are still in denial, if that anger is also marinating in exhaustion and fatigue, a sense of hopelessness and despair that this thing will never end.
We’re tired. We need to take a nap. We need to regroup.
I believe even those in denial are tired—tired of having to defend their position, tired of being ridiculed, tired of all the overreaction to what they don’t believe exists (or what they believe exists but is blown out of proportion).
What do we do when we grieve the loss of someone we love? After we’ve cried and thrown shit and sworn at God, we sleep, we tell stories about the good times, we allow others to feed and nurture us, and we come to terms with the fact that what we had, we will never have again. That, my friends, is acceptance. And it’s where we need to be.
It’s time for us to rest, to tell stories about the good times, and to feed and nurture each other, understanding that what we had, we will never have again.
We’re not getting over this, there’s no waiting for it to pass. That’s not how viruses work. But we WILL be okay, because we’re standing here together—you and me.
