For all who have had to say their goodbye to a loved one during the COVID-19 pandemic and have not been able to say “good-bye.”
My brother, Richard (“Rick”), died on December 15, 2020, during the wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was told that Rick contracted and died from “double-pneumonia,” but I have my suspicions that the long-term facility, where he was a resident, chose a diagnosis that seemed less harrowing than the more dreaded one. Regardless, he died, and I had not been able to visit him since early March 2020.
Yes, I was able to talk with him by phone, but it was often difficult to understand his speech. Frequently I was told he was “asleep,” “eating” his meal, or “working with physical therapy.” At other times, the staff was simply too busy and understaffed to answer the phone. On numerous occasions, I received a recording that the number had been changed or was out-of-order, and I resorted to calling a separate unit and asked to be transferred to my brother’s unit. Whatever the reason, it was not always easy.
On March 9, 2020, my husband and I traveled the 8-9 hours to visit Rick. The facility was always clean, and the staff was courteous and friendly; they made it easy for us to spend time with Rick. It was always so good to see him in-person during our visits to Orlando, and he seemed to be glad to see us. We made this trip 3-4 times each year, just as we had done for decades while our mom and dad were still alive; Rick had lived with them until their deaths in 2009 and 2011, respectively.
I remember so many details about our last visit that take me right back to being there: to our sitting in the facility’s sunroom, to laughter, to Rick’s more coherent conversation, and to the haunting question Rick asked while walking back to his private room: “Is this where I live now?” He had often mentioned—sometimes demanded—wanting to “go home” to the house he and our parents had built, to the house they lived in for nearly 40 years. He had never asked this question, and when I (sadly) said, “Yeah, you live here now,” he seemed to surrender to his reality. It was a visit I shall not forget.
Jeanne with her brother, Rick, and family.
The following day, Jeff and I traveled to Ft. Pierce, FL, to visit Jeff’s sister and her husband, who has been ill; we were to return home the next day. Our plan was to stop by to visit and to say good-bye to Rick until our next (summer) visit. When I called to let the staff know that we were on our way, I was informed that the facility was in “lock-down,” as a precaution to the increasing concern around the coronavirus spread and to the complications of COVID-19, and that “no visitors” were allowed in the facility. The nurse, in recognizing my disappointment, made it possible for me to say “good-bye” to Rick over the phone. Little did I know that this had been the last visit I would be allowed with my brother; the pandemic would surge and out-live him.
There is always grief that accompanies saying a final goodbye to a loved one. Grief escorts those of us, who live with the loss, on the road of remembering, of heartache, of the realization that those visits of so many years will be no more. In a way, grief befriends us to give us the space to mourn our loss; to remember our sacred longing for connection; to recognize the power of love we hold so carefully, so tenderly, in the depth of our souls. Grief gives us permission to experience the totality of what it means to be human—to love and be loved, and to belong and connect more deeply with ourselves and others through our relationships. Grief is an important and inevitable part of Loss.
And then—stealthily, from the shadows of our re-membering creeps in the doubt: Guilt.
I fought off my feelings of guilt by rationalizing — “But, I wasn’t allowed to visit him;”
by intellectualizing — “the situation made no exceptions;”
by convincing myself — “guilt is unproductive;”
“a waste of energy;”
“an unhelpful distraction.”
I reminded myself of all the same words I have said to those with whom I work in grief counseling: “Guilt is a choice” — “a feeling” — “a kind of quasi-control strategy.” I still agree, in part, with those assessments. However, coming to terms with this COVID Guilt of not being present to say “good-bye” to my brother (a guilt that has continued to poke at the back of my grief process) has given me a new experience and understanding of guilt. Many who have had loved ones die during this pandemic may understand this guilt of which I am speaking: “S/he died alone”; “I was not there with him/her”; “I did not do enough/was not enough.” Guilt, as only guilt can do, keeps us connected throughout attempts of trying to sort out how this loss might have turned out differently; of how we might have miraculously constructed a more Rockwell-like ending. Guilt keeps us involved in a scene-by-scene replay of our actions, or our lack thereof, and pushes us to try to rewrite a more admirable or altruistic ending—an ending that allows us to somehow control uncontrollable circumstances: “IF I had only” or “I could have — should have done. . . .”
The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered us little control to affect the outcomes, to tame our fears, or to hope that our presence might have made a difference. Rather, It has left us unprepared to negotiate uncompromising health problems, and overwhelmed by our feelings of helplessness, sadness, and surrender. It has denied us our natural inclinations to cleave to the ones we love. So, it is understandable that we—those of us who have “failed” to be present with our loved ones in their final weeks, days, and hours—would invite guilt to help us figure out when it all went so wrong. It’s guilt that often awakens us in the middle of the night, grips us by the chest and shouts at us, reminding us of our loss—of connection, of responsibility, of answers to unanswerable questions. And yet, perhaps guilt’s intention is to help us try to make controllable sense out of this situation that offered us so little, if any, control to render our preferred ending. Maybe guilt helps us try to make right what we feel has gone terribly wrong. We want to believe we could have done SOMETHING, ANYTHING! to have made a difference in this endless nightmare. Could it be that we would rather entertain guilt than realize how impotent we have been to demand a less grief-stricken outcome? We want to believe instead that we could have made a difference.
Guilt helps us believe in a reality of alternative narratives; helps us believe that we are more powerful than we are; helps us believe in an ending where we have power to transform circumstances around death—especially the death of a loved one. So, THERE it is. Guilt helps to distract us from fully embracing the pain and sorrow of untimely goodbyes. Guilt buys us time to process the reality that we take life for granted—and helps us realize how precious it is. Guilt invokes in us a reminder of the depth of love we can experience, and perhaps the depth of which we rarely acknowledge. It gives us a glimpse into our true nature that we humans are deep lovers. Guilt “re-members” us to our memories—to shared laughter and tears, to our longings and belongings, to our deepest desires, and to our capacity to love and to be loved. Maybe it is guilt that helps guide us on a path towards forgiveness—forgiveness for ourselves that we were not as powerful as we thought we should be nor as able to perform the miracles we imagined we could if only we had tried harder, had done more, had been more.
This COVID-19 pandemic has given us all the unique experience of worldwide grief, national grief, and community grief—amid all our family and our personal grief. It has given us permission to remember our humanity and our innate desire to love and to be loved, to experience the breadth and depth of our emotions, to belong to a much larger experience than one’s own, to be connected to one another in a shared experience that only this grief can provide. This grief offers us an opportunity to be held by a love who holds sacred our differences, our unique selves, and both our individual and collective experiences. This grief allows us to join in a shared experience of love and loss. And it is this love that promises true healing, forgiveness, and wholeness—to rise up out of the depths of our judgements, failures, and losses—of death.
Guilt, which is masterful in distracting us from slipping into lingering despair, is also instrumental in drawing attention to our individual and collective capacity to love. Guilt is a form of protest against realities beyond our comprehension and our ability to change them. Guilt is a testimony to our desire to hold on to what and to whom we love, and to know at our core that we cannot. Guilt, when looked at as a natural part of the grief process, is the part of the journey that leads us to our most vulnerable selves—and to our aversion to face our limitations, our brokenness, and our deep longing for connection. Interwoven in the grief process, guilt can be the gift that reconnects us to our humanity and to the depths through which only love can sustain us. Guilt may even lead us in reconnecting to what it means to be truly human—the acceptance of our limitations, the forgiveness for all we are unable to control, and the faith in the reality that we all are born from and die to LOVE.
For those to whom we have been pressed to say “Good-bye”: I know love more fully because of you. Be at rest in The Arms of Love.
Guilt keeps us involved in a scene-by-scene replay of our actions, or our lack thereof, and pushes us to try to rewrite a more admirable or altruistic ending—an ending that allows us to somehow control uncontrollable circumstances.
Jeanne Thiele Reynolds, DMin, LMFT, is an AAMFT Professional Member in Rabun Gap, Georgia, and holds the Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor designations.
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