Having missed it other years, I was super on top of getting my flu shot as soon as it came out in late September. By Valentine’s Day, the flu shot must have worn off because I started to feel bad while driving home from work. Dang it! The cough that appeared earlier in the afternoon wasn’t just a tickle in my throat.
By midnight my fever was 103. I vomited all morning, then spent the day on the couch watching movies. By the next morning, I felt human again. Enough to rally and lead a four-day work retreat that week, then attend a two-day retreat the following weekend?
Yes, thank goodness! Those retreats turned out to be some of the last times indoors with coworkers and friends—not just being, but living, together. Hugging, eating, sleeping, breathing. Being without fear that the flu could lead to the ICU.
Some anniversaries come and go. Notable but inconsequential. Another year at a job. Another birthday.
As we approach this COVID-19 anniversary though, each preceding experience from a year ago today, feels thick with significance.
In retrospect, we see meaning in all the crevices of the moments preceding the moment when everything changed. And it’s easier now to name all the elusive feelings that were hovering just below the surface of shock.
Surprise, followed by confusion, followed by hope, followed by reality, followed by survival. In the case of this last year—followed by the next surprise, then the next, then the next. Actual surprises. And new surprises of things we hadn’t noticed until now.
In all this survival, there wasn’t a lot of energy left for grief—deep sorrow, immobilizing suffering—to mourn what we didn’t know we were going to lose. And still losing.
Defying the laws of physics, the energy to accept feels so much harder than to resist.
To accept what happened. To accept the way things are, now. The “New Normal.”
Except, there is no more “normal.”
While I can’t remember a lot about holiday break during my junior year of college, I have replayed the day I dropped my Mom off at the hospital for minor surgery a million times. I dropped her off in the morning on my way to work, then surprisingly had to go back that night because she was on a ventilator in the ICU. Where she stayed for three days. Where we stayed for three days and three nights before she died.
Eighteen years ago and yet likely so similar to the feelings and stages that 2.5 Million families have experienced over the last year (except without actually getting to be together).
Surprise, followed by confusion, followed by hope, followed by reality, followed by survival. One that is so much harder by seeking a new normal. How is there a new normal after that?
After this last year?
There is something different. There is a new life.
A new way of being.
Rich with gratitude, presence, vulnerability, adaptability.
Fully accessible once the reality is accepted and we’ve mourned what we forgot we would inevitably lose. Not just people or things, but the sense of security, the sense of control, the sense of privilege—above nature, not within it.
Because things don’t stay the same. That is not the way the world works. It is dynamic, ever-changing, ever-calibrating. The ability to adjust to new conditions is adaptability.
Heading to the coast last weekend for my women spiritual group’s annual two-day retreat—albeit virtual this year—and coming up on our COVID-19 anniversary, I reflected a lot on the last year.
I packed everything that needed to be released to make way for new life.
To seal the intention of adaptability.
May you let the grief in and out this week.
Love,
Jules
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