I have these emotions that are making me so numb right now, and it’s difficult for me to even process.
I saw my father, from a distance smiling after the New Year. Knowing he had plans for 2021, especially with the vaccines coming.
By mid-January, I talked to my father a week after being hospitalized for the coronavirus and he was in high spirits and like my mother, I expected him to leave the hospital and come back home.
And here I am now with what hope I have left but also preparing for a reality that he will not be in our lives anymore.
The coronavirus hurts in so many ways that is unfathomable.
There is this grief that is so hard to explain because once a loved one is hospitalized for covid… you are denied on both sides. You can’t be there by their side, you can’t talk to them for more than a few seconds because they are on a breathing apparatus and you don’t want their heart rate to increase or to affect their breathing.
On the other end, I can only put myself in my father’s place of not seeing your loved ones, being in an unknown environment and also of how it starts to affect body and mind.
I’ve read so many news articles from those all over the world who had lost love ones.
Learning from their experiences, you do all you can to protect your family or to remind them because you don’t want this happening to you or your family. And then out of nowhere, the unthinkable happens.
I share this with you who have loved ones. Especially elderly grandparents or parents, even other relatives that you may be close with, to let them know much you love them. How much you care and if you can’t do that, pray. And to remind them to protect themselves of this virus and to have them practice self-restraint esp. until they and you and your family get their vaccinations or for them to be careful.
Because as we try to find this new normal and get back to the things we enjoy in life, knowing that this virus and its variants are out there.
I take comfort that many of you have prayed for my family. We are very grateful for your positive comments and your prayers during this tough time.
I’ve reached a point where I had to google because I’m feeling quite numb right now. But knowing at the same time, I have to be strong, I have to be positive but today, I was looking at Facebook messages my dad would send me and kind of lost it. Because the reality is starting to sink in.
I was reading this from Lorrie Gottlieb (a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. She is the author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone”) responding to a person who lost her father due to the coronavirus.
Gottlieb writes, “You can be kind to yourself and practice self-compassion. You can embrace the rage—because it’s valid. You can disinvite the guilt when it attempts to pay you a visit by reminding yourself that there’s nothing you could have done differently. (It wasn’t safe for you to travel. You didn’t know your father would get the coronavirus. Your father knew how much you loved him, even if the devastated part of you might suggest you believe otherwise.) And you can bear in mind the concept of impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel gutted this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, anguish, joy—blows in and out again. There will always be pain. Hearing a Beatles song on the radio might even plunge you into momentary despair. But another song, or another memory, might bring intense joy minutes or hours later”.
“There is no way around your grief, but there is a way to move through your pain. Be patient with yourself. Try to remember that eventually you will come to view the world as neither all good nor all bad. Hold a space for the fact that you hurt so deeply because you were loved so deeply. And let that braid of pain and love be a reminder that you are human, and you’re exactly where you need to be”.
I’m so grateful for this. Because I’m experiencing wide range of emotions that are hard to even describe right now.
