Missing the chance to say goodbye: Grief in the time of coronavirus

There are many occasions we can reschedule until after coronavirus: weddings, parties, graduation celebrations, but one thing we can’t rearrange is saying goodbye, writes Christine Manby

We experience our grief in multiple dimensions and in multiple languages, not all of them verbal (Tom Ford)

Lockdown has stolen many important moments even from those of us Covid-19 has not touched directly. We’ve been robbed of the ability to celebrate in person the births and birthdays, graduations and end of school celebrations, engagement parties, weddings and anniversaries that make life special. But such moments of shared joy can, we hope, be rescheduled for next year or for the year after that. Perhaps not so the equally important rituals we usually devote to saying “goodbye”.

At the height of lockdown, attendance at funerals was limited to immediate family only. As I write, 10 is still the maximum number of mourners allowed. A ban on staying somewhere other than your own home overnight makes travelling a large distance to mourn someone all but impossible. Thus many people are still missing out on the chance to say the traditional farewell to those who have been important to them. How do we begin to process grief when attending a funeral is out of the question? How should we be grieving anyway?

Sasha Bates is a former television producer turned integrative psychotherapist whose husband, the actor and playwright Bill Cashmore, died unexpectedly at the age of 56. In her new book, Languages of Loss, Bates weaves her own experience of that sudden, heartbreaking tragedy into an exploration of psychotherapeutic theory on grief. She says she wrote her book, which she began in the year after Cashmore’s death, “… to help me make sense of the senseless loss of my husband but also to help others in my position… The taboos, misunderstandings, and silence around grief in our society add immeasurable damage to an already heartrending process and I would like this book to open up a conversation and start to dissipate some of the shame and ignorance around what grief really feels like.”