To Grieve For Oneself

We don’t have the rituals to grieve for a lost self, or a blocked or abandoned path.

In the raw landscape of the early pandemic, I happened upon an online discussion that was already scores of replies deep — a conversation that felt a shade different from many elsewhere pondering the reach of grief during a time of tremendous loss.

The 280 characters that lit this thread’s fuse were written by a woman who was reflecting on what this global pause provoked within her. She questioned out loud into the digital void: “Is there a ritual in which we can grieve ourselves?” 

While we keep rituals and spaces to acknowledge the physical passings of loved ones, we don’t have the same for a lost self, or a blocked or abandoned path. This discourse struck me in ways that I hadn’t expected.

When the iron gates closed on daily life as we knew it, it also shut down possibilities, passageways, and new opportunities. I have friends whose children had high hopes for a college experience that would free them to explore a larger self in a new city. I know others, poised to sail into business ventures, whose hard-earned funding efforts evaporated when the world shut down. There were ex-colleagues who had, finally, sorted out a way to push forward after a painful downsizing, who now, after yet another layoff, didn’t know not only what the future might hold but if there would even be one. COVID-19 predictions, so dire, it felt like the end of the world.

I saw myself in the shards of this conversation. Even before the pandemic, my profession, journalism, had taken a series of hard hits, with thousands of editorial staffers left adrift post-layoffs. My loss, though, was less about a title or what I called myself; it was about the vanished path I’d followed for more than a decade.

In recent months, in the tumult of foreign wars and our own acrimonious election season, I have seen more of these introspective, publicly vulnerable conversations online. The pandemic set a stage and gave language to a specific sort of loss that was apart — yet subtly akin — to grieving a living being. It was about grieving the loss of a dream or hope, a passageway forward, a way of life.

Sympathy cards exist for the loss of a parent, grandparent, a beloved, doting pet, but attempting to support someone whom you love deeply, and who is in the throes of mourning some difficult-to-express sorrow, is a specific charge. How do we grieve lost contexts, big hoped-for (or trained for) destinations — the losses that change not just the trajectory of our lives but the shape of our idea of who we are in the world?

In a more recent post on another social platform, I drifted into another conversation that attempted to make sense of the inchoate unrest we feel in our souls:

“We can grieve circumstances. [S]ometimes when you find yourself plagued by waves of emotion from sadness to melancholy you may be grieving … the version of yourself that might have been if things had been different. …”

Our culture compels us to pick ourselves up, dust off, and move forward. That young woman who posted the message that first caught my eye was asking for something more intentional: wishing that there was some sort of apparatus that would allow one to address the new reality, one that honors the disappeared dream, but also one that reminds you not to let the loss take over, consume you from inside. As Buddhist minister Lama Rod Owens put forward in a recent episode of the podcast “The New Abnormal”: In these fraught times of collective grief, it’s incumbent on us to “acknowledge that sadness, that grief and then say, ‘How do we want to be now?’” For me, this would be confronting the loss, grieving it, finding place and people with whom to parse it. Not pretending that it didn’t cut deep or rather — especially — investigating, honestly, for yourself, who are you now? What lies in that new gap?

I’m a storyteller drawn to unique life arcs, to people who boldly take hold of their narratives — who have confronted loss, disaster, dead ends and have sorted out a way to build a bridge to the next shore — whether it is a project, or purpose, or fashioning a new identity. Each time, it has seemed, they’d salvaged the spirit of their former self and repurposed it: They see the juncture as not loss but a rerouting, and in this reframing it does indeed become a celebration of life.

Lynell George, a frequent contributor to LMU Magazine, is the author of several books including “A Handful of Earth. A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler,” a Hugo Award finalist. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, and the LA Weekly. She won a 2017 GRAMMY award for her liner notes to “Otis Redding Live at the Whiskey A Go Go.” Lynell George’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.