“There are concerns about mental health on many different levels as a result of the pandemic,” Denckla says. “This is fr

“Mourning and grief occur in groups,” says Christy A. Denckla, PhD, an assistant professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a clinical psychologist who specializes in grief and trauma. “Traditionally people gather in some way physically to mourn and grieve and collectively support one another. That’s of course impossible in Covid. So some of the very natural or typical ways that people might gather to commemorate loss and grief are impossible now.”

The year 2020 has been characterized for all by losses big and small. “There are losses of financial resources, of routines, of employment. The loss of visiting with family members,” Denckla says. “There’s the loss of arts events and sporting events, and it’s really across every domain that there have been losses.”

Shear likens our mental state to a computer with too many windows open. “I don’t know about you, but I have like 60 bazillion things running on my computer until it starts to get so slow that I have to start closing things, and it’s kind of like that,” she says. “There are all these things running in the background, for all of us, in our heads, so we can’t focus on anything really 100%.”

Society should do more to support people through that process both in terms of the pandemic and beyond it, Shear says. “We’re really ready to move on and to not pay attention to grief in general. So it’s not so surprising that we do that with this also.” She adds, “when someone loses someone close, we tend to say to them, ‘We’re so sorry.’ We take a half a minute to honor their loss and their pain and then we say, ‘Okay, now it’s time to move on.’”

“You have to understand that grief is going to be with you forever, it isn’t something that we do and then move on, that isn’t really the way it goes,” Shear says. “What we say is grief emerges naturally and it finds a place in your life, and when it finds that place is when you have really fully accepted, or pretty much fully accepted, the reality and found a way to move forward in a positive way for yourself.”

Shear says, “About 10% of people who lose someone to natural causes, and about 20% of those who lose someone to more violent deaths, like an accident, suicide, homicide — and Covid kind of is halfway in between that I would say — develop a condition we call complicated grief.”

Washington, D.C. artist, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, 61, of Bethesda, works on Tuesday October 20, 2020 to set up a public art project honoring people who have died in the pandemic. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In Albert Camus’ classic and recently much-quoted novel The Plague, the main character Dr. Bernard Rieux struggles with this question as he tries to comprehend the estimated 100 million people who have died from plagues throughout history. “But what are a hundred million deaths?” he wonders. “When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” Recalling the plague at Constantinople that, according to the ancient historian Procopius, caused 10,000 deaths in a single day, Rieux still can’t visualize this smaller but still enormous mass casualty. “Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces?”

The scale of this tragedy may be, counterintuitively, another factor complicating collective mourning. M. Katherine Shear, MD, a psychiatrist and founder and director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia University, says the tragedy of 9/11 occurred in one day in select locations and while massive in scope, was something people could at least attempt to wrap their heads around. With Covid-19, “it’s hard to conceive of all those people,” she says, “I even have trouble. When you talk about the World Trade Center, there’s a way in which I think of all those people dying at once. You talk about the pandemic, it has been eight or nine months now since we started seeing these increased death rates, and that feels so, so spread out, and it feels so individual somehow.”

Denckla adds, “One of the things that separates this from prior national events where we faced large numbers of death is it’s not over. This is ongoing. Oftentimes in commemorating the dead, it’s in hindsight that we engage in this process of collective remembering and collective mourning and the collective storytelling and all of the narrative and human grieving processes.”

For many, it is hard to spend time thinking of the tragedy of others when they are dealing with job loss, the daily worry of contracting the virus, and intense financial uncertainty, and even food insecurity as food banks across the nation are taxed. An important and bitterly contentious election and a long-overdue reckoning with racism have also demanded our attention this year.

On top of this, the normal struggles and difficulties of regular life have been compounded by the pandemic. Receiving needed treatments, finding childcare, and dealing with death from other causes have all become more complicated. Even just going to the grocery store requires a mini risk-benefit analysis.

But just because we’re having trouble articulating our feelings collectively or coming to grips with the scale of all that has happened, it doesn’t mean we’re not grieving, although we’re not necessarily grieving the dead.

For the friends and family of those killed by the virus, grief is not an abstraction. Kessler set up a Facebook group for people grieving the loss of loved ones this year from the pandemic or other causes. He says the group attracted more than 1,000 members on its first day and now has more than 20,000 members.

http://go.acaps.cat/vac/videos-LA-Clippers-Golden-State-Warriors-v-en-us-1qox-2.php

http://go.acaps.cat/vac/video-Chicago-Bulls-Kings-v-en-us-1mlv-.php

http://go.acaps.cat/vac/Video-Chicago-Bulls-Kings-v-en-us-1iex-2.php

http://go.acaps.cat/vac/videos-Chicago-Bulls-Kings-v-en-us-1qfq-14.php

eptember, GM said it would engineer and manufacture the Badger, plus take a $2 billion, 11% stake in Nikola. The deal would have provided billions in cash to GM. But it seemed to demonstrate an insecure GM, relegated to the labor pool while Nikola basked in GM’s engineering, whose much-promoted Ultium battery system would be part of the deal.