By Rae Goco

The night before someone passes away, one will dream of green pastures that had bundled mist lifting from its grounds. The sun never set and the flowers never wilt,  almost as if it were a place of infinite grace that spaced between life and death itself. It was peace manifesting into life beyond reality. Who would have thought that this feeling of peace is something worth yearning in the years to come?

Some people said that grief comes in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That was not always the case, grief was numbing before it was anything else. It was a void that indulged in everything it was not. It was a feeling that permeated you in ways you don’t even notice; it lingers, but it never feels real enough to categorize into phases. 

The Culture of Moving on

Grief has always been something we’re taught to get over with. That once the deceased is sent to rest, there is an inexplicable pressure from everyone around us to move forward in spite of it. They will tell you that there’s something bigger out there, that you can move past your grief and find the happiness that is buried under all the what-ifs and should haves that persist on top of it. For others, it’s true. They’ll create lives the deceased would never know: new jobs, new families, new homes, and new this and that’s. They would rather create a whole new person than live as the one who lost what they had. That’s fine, people grieve differently. That’s the kicker. 

It’s just that as “moving on” serves as the predominant culture, it denies the validity of all the other ways people cope. Of the people who are swallowed by a singular stage of grief and never move past it. The ones who hold the wounds of it too deep in their heart. Those who can’t find physical things to manifest the abstractness of grief. 

Pandemic Grief

Grief is complex, it takes forms that everyone and no one can feel. Yet, the pandemic showed me that it could, in a fashion both collective and painful, come to be acknowledged. That while it is complex, it is still something that can be observed and identified within trends from the populous. As such, the pandemic revealed the virtual facets of grief—one that is carried by so many, yet not truly felt by anyone.

As over the pandemic, a digital candle is lit on my Facebook timeline to signify another stranger’s beloved is being memorialized as another statistic of a growing death rate in the country. Strangers, known to neither the bereaved nor me, shower their sympathies by etching their names on the mourner’s virtual guestbook of a comment section. This continues on until you light a candle yourself and the comments follow. For the most part, it’s comforting because everyone knows your grief, but neither you nor the sympathizers feel it.  It doesn’t feel real. 

This is especially when you are bereft of the things that made you feel that you’re grieving: the funerals, the eulogies, the all souls visits, and the last encounters. Now, it’s zoom funerals and visits, lengthy Facebook posts, and the last video call and text. In a way, it’s a good adaptation of traditional mourning to our current context. However, this new way of grieving is admittedly quite difficult to pace with. For when grief needed not the traditions and rituals that helped ease our loss, it felt like there was no physical place to put our sadness一of the underlying resentment of the loss that took a part of us with it. We don’t feel like we’re grieving, just at a loss. 

Carrying our grief in the post-pandemic world

So it comes as no surprise that to respond to dismal conditions of our grief, we force the culture of moving on. How, once the pandemic is over, this sad, horrible, tragic (and rightfully so) section of our lives is also “over.” A conclusion that all that was lost is lost. As the cliche goes, “the past is past.” We might not return to our pre-pandemic lives, but we’ll start a new one. There is so much hope being built from the idea that our grief will subside when its very perpetrator is eradicated. But the thing is, it won’t. Grief lingers, even in its most absent forms.

So now, as we slowly transition into the almost-hyper-futuristic “post-pandemic” world, this year’s All Soul’s Day has brought greater complexity to how we mourn; because at this time that remembers the departed so fondly, we are left to wonder what of the grief we’ve learned and fostered throughout the pandemic purposely serves us. What can we carry to a world that aspires to a life without it?

Well, we have to recognize the pandemic as we carry the memories of those who were lost. The truth is, grief was never meant to be forgotten but remembered. The pandemic showed us the plurality of grief as it phases through spheres of loss. How it can be felt and experienced without traditional mourning, such as funerals and burials, but also absent yet existing in the way we collectively comfort and heal. Remembering is so important to help ourselves, but also to continue to love the deceased beyond life and death. It’s what keeps us going: the remembrance of the nonetheless fulfilling lives of those who came before however short or long it was. Tell people about the things they loved, the things they hated, or the moments of them you’ve so greatly replayed in your head. It’s a gentle touch of hope amidst the despair that measures happiness over periods of time. 

Here’s the thing: Grief is the future. The post-pandemic world must be built from the foundation of grief, of the people that could’ve been belonging and creating in it. It’s the reason why we remember history, because it allows us to evolve and be better—as a society, as individuals. 

As for myself, I dream of my grief, and that’s okay. You’re allowed to remember, even when it feels like the world is pushing past it. It’s because we feel our grief that we become more humane to the complex and incomprehensible ways others experience it. It’s funny to think that loss can be something so complex, but it is. You can go from a void that can never encapsulate it to finding the words to. Grief can make you grow. Understanding that makes it possible for others too. After all, moving on is a paradox because there is no true way to separate yourself from the formative moments of your life, as painful as it is.