The Ability to Grieve and Mourn
By Albert B. Kelly
As a country, we’ve always had our moments of national
unity. Sometimes the glue of those moments came in the form of national pride
resulting from some type of achievement like landing a man on the moon. In
other instances the glue of those moments of unity came in the form of
determination such as civilians showing up in large numbers to sign up for
military service after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Then too, the glue for those moments of national unity came
in the form of collective grief and mourning such as in the days immediately
following President Kennedy’s assassination or the mourning that took place
after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon in 2001. In both instances there were official days of mourning where
flags were lowered, but the real mourning continued for weeks and months
afterward.
As I write this, we are in the midst of a global pandemic
that has touched every continent and country on the face of the earth save
perhaps Antarctica. Some 6.2 million people have been infected with the novel
coronavirus with some 370,000 dead. In the United States, approximately 1.7
million people have been infected and with over 104,000 dead (think capacity
crowd at the L.A Coliseum).
Drilling down a little further and a little closer to home,
in New Jersey roughly 161,000 have tested positive for Covid-19 and some 11,600
have lost their lives in this pandemic. In Cumberland County, 2,000-plus
residents have tested positive with over 70 deaths and in my community of
Bridgeton, we’ve had over 600 of our neighbors test positive with 18 deaths.
It is one thing to site the numbers; it is an entirely
different thing to feel the impact and to mourn. I say that, because one big
thing that seems to be missing from this entire experience is any collective
sense of grief and mourning. There may be many reasons for this, not least of
which is the fact that we’re still sort of in the middle of this pandemic.
Unlike the occasions mentioned above, this isn’t an event that happened in
minutes or hours with a beginning and an end, it’s ongoing over weeks and
months- and perhaps years.
Maybe we will have some collective sense of mourning at some
point in the future once there is a vaccine and once there are medications and
treatments that render this coronavirus more readily survivable and far less
lethal. I hope so. But in the meantime, it is fair to ask what type of hangover
we’ll have by the time we get to that point. It would also be fair to speculate
on whether the mourning and grief will be collective and national or silent and
endured alone.
It is worth considering because not every area has
experienced this pandemic in the same way. As I write this, there are people in
some states and regions of the country shrugging their shoulders and wondering
what the fuss is all about, while certain states and cities have been crushed with
the number of sick and dead in their midst.
The other concern is that the number of dead from this
pandemic will simply be a number that becomes a source of division and fighting
with some squawking about conspiracies and ulterior motives and others about
disproportionate impacts. What will get lost is the fact that hundreds of
thousands of households and families have been changed forever.
One thing that haunted us after the 9/11 attacks were the
phone calls from the planes and the towers from those who knew or suspected
that they wouldn’t make it home that dreadful Tuesday. Similarly, tens of
thousands of people didn’t know that when they took their loved one to the
hospital, they wouldn’t see them again. Many didn’t get to say goodbye or else
they had to do so over a device because they couldn’t be there in person.
I hope that we, as a nation, have the willingness and the grace
when the time comes, to set aside politics and divisions long enough to actually
mourn for what we’ve lost as a nation and recognize what families around us have
lost in their homes and hearts. Such moments call for leaders able and willing
to rise above self-interest and politics to help give form and expression to mourning
and grief. That is part of how a nation heals.