So, it really stinks to feel things very deeply—especially the hard things. To be a person who gets a minor emotional scrape, but feels it as if I’m being flayed like a fish can make me feel a little ridiculous—a little weak.
Today’s one of those days.
Nothing about the last five months has been easy, but the last two have been especially hard, and today feels like a comma in a sentence that will never have a proper punctuation to end it.
I got in my car to drive down the hill to my daughter’s school this morning. It’s the day we pick up personal belongings and drop off library books. When I got into my car, I didn’t feel so much as a pin prick—it was just a task to complete.
Maybe it was all of the “we miss you signs,” or the balloons bundled like arches, trying to remind everyone that the end of a school year is supposed to be a happy thing. Instead, it felt like unfinished business—a door left ajar.
I’m always the emotional, weepy mom dropping off the first day, and picking up the last. Maybe that’s just how it was going to be anyway. I felt myself mourning the fact that she didn’t get an end of the year hug from her kindergarten teacher. And whether I thought the day I went to help her class pack up everything they needed for distance learning was probably going to be the last day for them or not—I would never have spoken those words or accepted them.
When I arrived home with the ridiculous tears streaming down my face, my husband reminded me that our daughter doesn’t know the difference. She doesn’t really have a sense that she missed “the end” of anything in the way many of us are feeling it.
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| I believe this may be Pete the Cat. |
It doesn’t matter if it’s the end of your kid’s first year, fifth year, or college graduation, for parents who were expecting a proper closing of the door, it feels like we left something important unattended to. And sure, there are plenty of kids feeling that too.
These are losses for all of us experiencing them. It doesn’t matter whether we think all of the decisions that have been made were appropriate, or if we think closures and restrictions were overkill. Just because I trust science and medicine over politicians and businessmen doesn’t mean I don’t feel the frustrations, anxiety, the anger about different decisions, and the sadness about so many little losses. In fact, because of the way I am built mentally, I don’t feel any of these things in a vacuum—I feel them for every single one of us.
They’re all hard things—no matter how big or small.
Living through this period of time is very stressful. Many of us are worried about the health and safety of people we care about. Many of us are anxious about how this crisis has impacted our families’ incomes and stability. We’re worried about our kids’ education. We’re feeling trapped in a circumstance that has left us feeling like life isn’t in our hands—in our control.
All of this is so heavy. It’s no wonder the small losses are the ones we can allow ourselves to feel and to process.
I chatted with a friend last night, and she mentioned celebrating her granddaughter’s birthday. Her granddaughter is one of my daughter’s friends, and I don’t think we’ve ever missed her birthday. I felt sad, because without the text invite to a party, I didn’t remember when her birthday was. It’s silly, I suppose, but we lost another little life event.
It feels a little silly to feel so much about small losses when thousands of families are mourning loved ones who died alone. It feels silly to feel so much about small losses when millions of us are experiencing the very serious stresses of unemployment, furloughs, decreased incomes and worries about how long we can continue on under current conditions.
So, as always, I feel a tug of guilt about feeling so deeply about the little things. Maybe in some way, they are more tangible, because without them, time that is filled with so much mundanity and simply putting one foot in front of the other passes without punctuation—without doors being closed.
The truth is most of us are unconnected to the thousands who have lost their lives and the millions who have been directly touched by this unseeable entity. All we can connect with are the its effects.
Feeling the worry over day to day survival, responsibilities, loss of little things, and all the doors forever left ajar doesn’t diminish the big picture—the loss of so many people who were more than faceless numbers.
I saw something on Facebook recently expressing the criticism that the media hasn’t done a memorial to the dead from this virus.
My feeling is that because this death is continuous—the tragic event hasn’t ended. Maybe that’s another reason why so many of us are mourning small losses—because trying to mourn the big thing is impossible. The big thing is the biggest unpunctuated sentence of all. How can you properly mourn a loss that feels like a run-on sentence—a tragedy taking place in slow motion?
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| We’ll find the rainbow after the storm, and see the sun again. |
And so we feel what we know how to feel. I know how to be sad my daughter didn’t get a sweet last day of school with her teacher and classmates. I know how to be worried that this crisis is touching our family’s security. I know how to worry about loved ones who might not survive getting this virus. I know how to feel frustrated by not having the freedom and space I need to process all of these small things, and the biggest thing.
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