Grieving during a Global Pandemic

My world changed on Friday 16th April 2020. My phone rang at 8.34am, and I thought it was my mum calling to make sure I was awake and up (I was still in bed) and editing my dissertation. I teased that I'd beaten her to it. Instead of laughing, she told me news that changed my world forever. My loving, wonderful, amazing grandma had died.

Writing that sentence is difficult, because seeing the words there in black and white makes it real. And even a month later, I still don't want it to be real. How can someone be there one moment and then gone the next? So quickly, so quietly, without a goodbye? 

I had seen and spoken with her on Skype five days before, on Easter Sunday. And suddenly she was gone. 

I hardly left my room in the days that followed. I cried a lot, stared blankly into space as my brain repeated over and over that she was gone. I slept a lot, lived in my pjs, didn't eat. 

I still had my dissertation to finish, as well as 4 more university assignments. I didn't know how to do them. I didn't want to do them. I wanted to drop out. I was depressed, I was grief ridden, I was done. I covered myself in guilt and grief and hid from the real world.  

I felt so guilty. I still do feel guilty. Because I chose to lockdown in my student house in Bristol with my housemates, I'd been exposed to so many people and I had no idea if I had COVID-19 or not. I lived with essential workers and the risk of me getting it or carrying it was high. 

I went into lockdown 200 miles away from my family, from my grandma, because I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I came home and unknowingly gave the virus to her. I stayed away to keep her safe and she died anyway.

She didn't die from the virus. She fell walking in her garden on the Thursday evening and had either a heart attack or a stroke from the shock. It was quick, it was natural, and she died in her garden, her favourite place in the world. She died in the tiny Lincolnshire village she had lived in since 1953, where she raised three children and where she lived next door to her only son and two of her nine grandchildren.

It was exactly what she wanted, what she had been ready for for quite a few years now. She would always tell me that she was ready to go anytime, she had lived long enough. She was 99 after all.

She was very ready to go. But none of us were ready to let her go. 

That's the thing about losing someone. They're no longer around to tell you how to live without them. 

I was lucky to be allowed to travel home for her funeral. Her only living sibling, my great uncle Francis, did not want to risk travelling from Norwich at 93, no matter how much he wanted to be there. My aunts and uncle came. My older brother and I were there. 7 of us stood in the churchyard next door to my childhood home, on a beautiful spring day in early May. The sun was shining and I remember them carrying her coffin and I couldn't stop thinking that it should be raining. That it should be dark. The sun on my face never felt more wrong.  

It's hard to grieve in a Global Pandemic. In some ways it feels like everyone is grieving. For loved ones, for friends, for routines, for freedom, for normality. For the living as well as the ones that have so cruelly been taken from us. 

I've found it hard grieving for a loved one who was lucky enough to die of old age, and not from this horrible virus. Guilty that I got to go to her funeral, when so many people right now don't have that chance. I was luckier than most, and I grateful for the chance I got to say goodbye to someone who meant the absolute world to me. 

The unfortunate thing is, the state of the world only intensified the grief I feel at losing my grandma. The anxiety I feel for the safety of my loved ones, my friends, my housemates and their families, my university friends and lecturers and their families has only increased. So many people have been lost, I could quite easily lose myself in my grief as I grieve for everyone, not just my grandma. It's hard not to succumb to the grief I feel, even a month later. My grief is still ongoing. The world is still grieving in some way, weeks after this Pandemic started. Life is so strange right now. People are angry and confused and scared and grieving and there is so much uncertainty surrounding the future it can be overwhelming at times. For me, all I want is for something good to eventually come out of all of this sadness. I hope that the grief we have all felt will be turned into energy to make the world a better place after all this. I hope our grief will not have been in vain.  

I'm not finishing this post with my own words, my own voice, but with my grandma's voice and someone else's words. We shared a love of literature and words and one of the few videos I have of her is this one, of her reciting most of "Similar Cases" a poem by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman. It's a wonderful poem about human beings evolving, about little Eohippus being told he could not change his nature and ever be something else. I think it is very fitting for the world right now, where we want a better world to emerge out of this horrible Pandemic. It gives me hope in my uncertainty and my grief that we will build something better the second time around. I think at the end of the day, we owe it to the people we've lost, whether it was through the virus or not, to build a better world than the one they left behind.