Grief is a unique journey: I vacation it by telling life stories

Alison Rombough

Like numerous other people viewing as the fatalities mounted, the masks went on and we waited for a vaccine that could conserve our life, I realized early on that COVID-19 would alter anything.

By no extend of my quite wild creativity could I have envisioned just how considerably, and how deeply, a virus we might hardly ever heard of would alter the way we live and die.

About the past 16 months, in the midst of a collective grief that hugs the world, I have attended Zoom funerals. Watched as friends and followers on my social media web pages mourned spouses, moms and dads, small children, close friends, some lost to COVID others to heart attacks or most cancers. Published about the wellness treatment angels who acquire treatment of these people today as they die. About households who could not stop by the individuals who make a difference most to them in nursing houses or hospitals, separated by gates or thick glass windows, so they threw some balloons on their auto and joined a “spouse and children parade” by way of a treatment facility parking large amount.

In a file photo from May 2020, family members of all ages were part of a parade at Solaris HealthCare on Merritt Island, allowing residents who can't have visits during the coronavirus crisis to see and hear their loved ones from a distance in the facility's parking lot.

I imagine about the men and women who’ve however not been in a position to have a celebration of a life well-lived, the hugs and words of comfort and ease they needed in individual coming rather in the variety of heart-shaped emojis on a textual content concept. I speculate how they grieve. Where by they are in their journey toward any semblance of reconciliation. I stimulate them to achieve out to experts, these as the bereavement workforce at St. Francis Reflections right here in Brevard County.

And then, I write.

Most recently, I have been next the conclusion-of-life journey of  Alice Eldridge, the 91-calendar year-previous mom of a friend I have recognized for almost 40 several years.

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