The art of grief

By JoAnne Young

The grief that has been experienced in the past year and a half from covid deaths, from loss of jobs and pets and social contact could encircle the globe many times. 

 

I had my own losses. I chose to leave my job in January this year. It was the right time but, all the same, it was bad timing because of the pandemic. Two months later I lost my sister, the third member of my immediate family of four to die, leaving just me to house my family memories, to carry on in their stead. 

 

Statistics will tell you that for every death, an average of five people are left to grieve. With all due respect to statisticians, I think the average could be at least double that.

 

From covid deaths alone, that would mean 6.1 million people and counting in the United States  grieving in the past year and a half. In the state of Nebraska, 22,670. In Lancaster County, 2,410 in grief.

 

I heard a well-crafted line of dialogue on a TV show I was watching recently. 

 

“During a pandemic, shouldn’t all the other tragic crap take a break? … The body can only take so much.” 

 

One thing I have learned since my sister’s death is that grief, as painful as it is, is not pure pain. Woven in and around it are poignant moments. Meaningful remembrances. 

 

One of those happened for me in my basement a few weeks after my sister’s death, while I was cleaning up in a storage area. There on the floor, near nothing that I could see it would have tumbled from, lay a letter, a bit time worn but very readable. It was only two pages, back and front, not the entire letter and not signed, but I knew from the handwriting and content it was from her. 

 

It was decades old, written after I had told her I was pregnant with Carson, my oldest son. She told me that my pregnancy was terrific news, and that she had fought the urge to call our mother in Texas and tell her to call me, “afraid she would figure it out” before I could tell her myself. 

 

“I just wish we didn’t live so far apart,” she wrote. “It would be so nice to live in the same town.” 

 

I lived in Omaha at the time. She lived in Virginia. 

 

She counseled me on morning sickness, telling me that eating six smaller meals a day was sometimes better than three. Told me to get plenty of rest.

 

“Try and enjoy your pregnancy,” she said. 

 

That letter reminded me that she was also the first person I had called months later when being a new mother got the better of me, and I needed someone to sit quietly while I sobbed into the phone and wondered how I could carry out this important and difficult task of mothering. 

 

She did all the right things a sister should do. 

 

I loved finding that letter, a perfect reminder of what we had shared as sisters. Those things are sometimes forgotten when you live far apart and you are busy with your own lives. 

 

Grieving is an art, I believe, and as many arts are, a lonely one. If we are going to do it right, we can’t push it away, put yellow caution tape around it and busy our minds with other tasks.  

 

So I determined this week that instead of waiting for those grief waves to wash over me when I least expect them, I will give my losses the time they are due, the place in my life they have earned. 

 

And for Jackie, I will sit with her memory, our memories, and continue to be her sister.