Courage to Connect

When my daughter died, I found myself on the outside looking in. The world, to my amazement, continued to turn. Birthdays, weddings, and holidays, workdays and days off continued and the rest of humanity marched in time. I stayed home. I wrote and read and ran and went for walks with my dog. I attended and observed, too, these rituals that mark life’s transitions and the passage of time but rarely felt like participating. In the unfairness of losing a child, I felt left behind by the world and was in no hurry to catch up and rejoin it. Nor, at times, did it feel that the world was particularly welcoming in making space for my return. Grief is lonely. For no one else experiences it quite like you do; your relationship with the person or event or period in your life is unique to you and the grief born of their passing is too.

Today I find the tables turned. I feel grief for the loss of many of the rituals, routine and extraordinary, from which I felt isolated four years ago, but I am not alone. Everyone I know is struggling to keep apace the rapid changes wrought by COVID-19. The world itself is at an eerie standstill. All that we rely on in our daily life – our places of learning, worship, social gathering, competition, and celebration – are closed or cancelled or at a minimum changed. So too, in grief, it feels as if there is no firm ground anymore, no safe spaces. Questions born of the loss breed a suffocating uncertainty. Added to that today are the directives of quarantine, isolation, and social distancing, which, while seeking to keep us and the most vulnerable safe, threaten our need for connection in a time of loss and change. But grief and the uncertainty that comes with loss is an experience shared by most right now. Together we grieve the loss of physical gathering and relationship, of feeling secure in navigating public spaces, of our routines of home and school and work and play, and for some, the loss of loved ones to the pandemic.

That this is a shared experience presents us with a unique opportunity. For we are not alone in our loss during this time; we are not on the outside looking in on a world marching forward as if nothing has changed. For the world itself is changed now. Our collective loss makes way for collective grief, and with it, an opportunity to connect, rather than feel isolated in, our grieving. No doubt, this time too has fueled fear, panic and distancing, or attempts to focus on our difference from people who experience loss as a means to control our own fears of loss. (Brené Brown, in her research on shame, calls this “insulating,” explaining that “[w]e use this concept of otherness to insulate ourselves and to disconnect. . . . We basically blame them for their experience.” I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) (New York: Avery, 2007), 147 (public library).) But this mutual experience likewise presents us with an opportunity to connect: to empathize and to share in the stillness created by collective loss. Together we stand in the eye of the storm facing an unknown future.

To connect during this time is to practice courage. Courage, rooted in the meaning heart, is “to live to the point of tears” writes David Whyte, citing French philosopher Camus. This, to Whyte, means “an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level.” Consolations (Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press, 2018), 39-40 (public library). Likewise drawing on the origin of the word, Brené Brown defines ordinary courage as “[s]peaking from our hearts,” which Brown asserts is an anecdote to disconnection experienced in shame. I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) (New York: Avery, 2007), xxiv (public library). When we open our hearts to ourselves and to each other, we affirm that there is space for all of us, wholly broken, in this changed world. We choose to share the burdens of uncertainty and isolation through connection, making lighter the load and opening ourselves up to the possibility of something new and beautiful.

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I created Eightstrong to be a place to connect, to share stories that affirm that our stories are shared, that we are not alone. Four years later, I find myself returning to this place and the space within me that gave it life. For Eightstrong was born out of my own grief and the connections that I found in it. Eightstrong is the namesake of a group of my closest girlfriends and their children, now grown substantially in the four years since it was created, representing the connections that carried me through some of my darkest days after my two-month old daughter, Eliana Frances, died. I hope that these reflections carry you forward, reminding you that you are not alone, in the days and weeks and months ahead as we face the substantial challenge of today and the unknown ones of tomorrow.