Grief in Quarantine

I’ll admit, the first couple of weeks of staying home were not so bad. Of course, I missed all of you! But I’m an introvert from the word go, and spending time at home does not bother me one bit. At first, it just felt like this was a rare stint where my family didn’t have anything going on – no travel, no meetings, no schedule juggling; and I was not mad about it. 

Somewhere during week three it started to get really real – when things I had been looking forward to were being pushed back or cancelled. On April 3^rd, I was supposed to co-officiate a wedding. Not just any wedding, but my big sister’s wedding. The event itself and the weekend together was something that my family had been looking forward to and planning for for many months now. It’s been pushed back to September, and we’ll continue to look forward to it; but that weekend did not look like we expected. Rather than being together, we were texting each other about what might have been – about what will be…in September.

That’s just one example from my own life, and as dates for the end of social distancing get farther and farther away, these possible cancellations encompass more and more of the things on my calendar that I’ve been looking forward to. I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve heard from countless others that I’ve talked to in the past few weeks about the disappointments that this quarantine is leaving in its wake. I’ve even had conversations with high school students about wanting to go back to school! And after the news today that they will not return this school year, it is yet one more disappointment to add to the list.

Missing out on things that we’re looking forward to – or maybe even just things that make us feel normal is tough, and it may feel selfish to say that if we’re sitting at home and healthy; but it’s the truth. And it’s also true that we may be grieving in these moments. We may be grieving a missed opportunity to do something fun, or not getting to hug the neck of someone that we miss so much, or we may just be grieving a lack of normalcy.

Whatever the case, it is okay to grieve. It’s okay to name our disappointments without feeling selfish. We don’t have to look very hard in the Psalms to find the psalmists laying their grief and their struggles and their lament at God’s feet:

I say to God, my rock,

“Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk around mournfully 

because the enemy oppresses me?”

As with a deadly wound in my body, 

my adversaries taunt me, 

while they say to me continually, 

“Where is your God?”

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

And why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

My help and my God.

                                          -Psalm 42:9-11

Now, I’m not suggesting that my missing out on the things on my calendar that I have looked forward to puts me in the same boat as the psalmist who feels God has abandoned him. What I am suggesting is that grief during this time is real, and naming that grief is important. When we name our grief rather than ignoring it, we are able then to move toward ‘hope in God’ as does the psalmist.

What is it that you’re grieving during this time of quarantine and social distancing, and where do you find hope?