A six-week pressure cooker

Rain is beating down again; it feels like a deluge every third day now. Six weeks of temporary ups and steep downturns, exacerbated in so many ways.

Where are you in this storm? How are you navigating the isolation—unable to be with loved ones, or face to face with people you care about? You may be grinding it out on the front lines, or perhaps sheltering in place.

Do you experience a battle between trying to stay connected, even lending a hand during the pandemic, with trying to stay balanced and hopeful?

If you’re anything like me, some mornings are a struggle. I rise hours before first light, torn and anticipating the latest news of suffering and dysfunction. It feels like prolonged strife just setting in, far heavier than short-term strains that can be lifted by some magical reopening.

We’re in a pressure cooker, for sure.

It’s tough to fend off despair and even depression—which seem to vacillate with glimpses of gratitude like the rotation of raw and more promising days this spring. And while no one can claim to know when this will abate, what seems sure is that life as we used to know it has become much more fragile.

A pulverizing aspect of this rapid change feels so challenging.

You may be brutally aware, more than myself, of how so much has happened in such compacted time. That pulverizing aspect of change feels so challenging. We’re drained before we know it, our energies and work routines and social connections thrown off. So many developments and setbacks occur each week, if not daily—beyond the almost numbing statistics—packing far more volatility than we could have imagined before.

If you’re spent by Friday morning, you’re not alone.

We each likely have friends and families on the edge of financial calamity, if not already there.

We worry and pray for family members and others treating the sick or accompanying the dying. A friends’ daughter, a physician, endured the spike in Manhattan; a girlfriend of our close friends’ son was apparently untouched by the virus, lone among an infected nursing home staff here at home. 

More broadly, many fault lines in our society have been re-exposed. Vulnerable people and whole communities at spiked risk as this catastrophe again bares our pernicious failures and bitter ironies.

A gust brings more driving rain.

How this contagion impacts people trying to cope with a previous loss is another emerging truth. Part of the work my wife and I do is providing peer-led bereavement outreach to children, adults, and families. We are trying to figure out the depths and layering of those grief triggers during the pandemic, and how to support others riding the inevitable surges to come. 

As a community, for example, we don’t just “send thoughts…” to someone who now is unable say goodbye or visit her aging or virus-compromised mother in a hospital. We cry for them both. We find other ways to connect, new resources to suggest—even while feeling momentarily paralyzed by the nightmare of not saying goodbye.

Far less straining, but still biting, is how people who are grieving juggle the added, competing uncertainties of this time. Their neighbors may complain that routines have been disrupted—shopping, the gym—and they must handle this disconnect of relative hardship.

Tomorrow, I may feel refreshed. But the rain continues to fall hard.

Of course, this contagion ushers in many other losses: high school seniors without a graduation; teachers and students cut off from one another; family gatherings and celebrations still on the calendar but unlikely to come. And helping people traumatized during this uncertain time, whether children stuck at home or practitioners making critical care decisions, will be an ongoing challenge. 

I recently met a woman who lost a sibling last December due to a chronic illness after a steady, year-plus decline. Her sister was only in her early 60s, and family members at least were able to play cards and visit her, and say goodbye. The same woman then lost one of her children unexpectedly early this year. Six weeks later, Covid-19 infections were spreading across the country.

She is not raging (though no one would fault her). She needs time to breath. Space to unpack some of what has fallen like bricks on her family. She already knows that many facets of their child’s loss will continue to cycle through in the months and years ahead—undeserved feelings of guilt, the circumstances of the death itself, and wanting to ensure that their child will not be forgotten.

When the rain pounds on my roof, it could be shaking hers with gale force winds.

Emerging challenges will steepen.

In another scenario, a frontline practitioner at a major Boston hospital reached out to my wife about two weeks ago as her team prepared for a surge of Covid-19 patients. We’re going to need help, she said. So Denise and her colleagues are assembling support groups where medical health care workers can vent and cope better with their load.

Other challenges will steepen. Earlier this week, a contact at a homeless shelter serving our region told me a bit about how her dozen families are handling things there.

Her staff is trying to get the kids to follow protocols more consistently: wearing masks, and hand washing. Many of the children see themselves as being at home and resist social distancing. Schools sent extra tablets but not all the kids use them. The staff is looking ahead, concerned about a lack of summer camps and enough scheduled activities.

“What they are going to learn from this time is what they are witnessing,” she told me. “We have to do everything we can to make sure their spirit flourishes and grows.”   

I found a parallel to this spirit of compassion in an insightful column in today’s Boston Globe. In her piece, Renée Loth built upon her maternal grandmother’s experience surviving the Spanish flu, and then the Depression. Loth probed whether we “can hold on to the lesson of communal responsibility that the coronavirus pandemic is teaching.”

Can the imprint of this disaster help us build more compassionate policies as we recover? We can stitch together the safety net more tightly and recreate an economy where fewer people need to use it — but only if we can hold on to the lesson of communal responsibility that this pandemic is teaching.

— Renée Loth

Tomorrow I may wake later and be refreshed about this. I may reclaim gratitude, which feels authentic. Our family remains safe, and many good people around us continue reaching out to others in varied ways.

But for now, the rain continues to fall hard.

*****

“Rain Has Fallen All The Day” by James Joyce

Rain has fallen all the day.
O come among the laden trees:
The leaves lie thick upon the way
Of memories.

Staying a little by the way
Of memories shall we depart.
Come, my beloved, where I may
Speak to your heart