Re-Mapping Grief and Mourning

Story and Photo by: C. S.

On April 22nd, after three weeks of being hospitalised, my father passed away from complications related to Covid. His passing has been a whirlwind of inexplicable pain and broken mourning for everyone in my family. I have been stuck in Germany, where I live, since the pandemic started. My home country, Spain, has been really hit by the pandemic, and I haven't been able to go back home or meet my family since it started.

I am a strange witness of what Lauren Collins calls, “the transformation of mourning during the pandemic”, and, like her, we’re now part of this “vanguard” that I, like her, never aspired to join. Also like her, I’m learning how to reinvent grief in an era of enforced isolation. On the one hand, the quarantine has given me the relief of solitude and quiet mourning, the privilege of stopping without undesirable side effects. On the other hand, it has left me with the impossibility of physical contact and social ceremonies. My family is not great with words, so the lack of references on what to do next has made survival a quest. We move on, day by day, waiting for things to unfold, to achieving some sort of normalcy, despite knowing everything has changed forever. 

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion talks about her own experience of loss: “When you mourn your loss you also mourn, for better or worse, yourself. As we were. As we are no longer”. This is the closest definition I’ve found of my/our current moment; so frustratingly inconclusive. A few weeks later, I’m still stuck in Germany, dealing with loss and grief in isolation while Zooming with my family every night as a channel of transmitting grief and sorrow. Those meetings are a bizarre temporary substitute for other rites that would have taken place instead, such as a funeral or a burial, which aren’t currently allowed. We’ve had to be inventive instead; building altars in our homes, creating personal rituals to find solace, adding new meaning to mundane objects. Those new rituals give us a vague farewell sense while being in this suspended state. 

I find it interesting how we use, sometimes, terms related to cartography and geography to discuss physical or mental states. Situatedness is what connects us to our environment, society or culture. After such a disruption of place and time such as the one we’re currently living, we are involuntarily remapping our positions in relation to the world, both individually and collectively. The concept of isolation, meaning “island”, is as related to situatedness as another cartographic concept is to grief: “terra incognita”, meaning “unknown territory”. The Covid experience forced us to navigate through this unknown territory in an attempt to take care and situate ourselves.  However, we’re also trapped in our own islands. The structures of those islands –accessibility to technology, the gift or lack of companionship, dis/ability, etc– have also determined how (and if) we could survive. Technology has been, for me and my family, a saving tool at the same time that it has been a traumatic impediment for communication, grief, and many processes that we're experiencing at the moment. The seniority of both my parents has thrown a big light on digital access and ability. After my father was hospitalized, my mother was alone at home in isolation. She couldn't see anyone for almost three weeks, until my father passed away, and then she was able to meet my brother at the hospital for a brief visit. Teaching my elderly mother, at a distance, how to use technologies like Zoom, with technology itself, was extremely complicated. On top of that, her lack of internet knowledge made it almost impossible for her to escape the TV spectacle and the media hammer of images and death numbers.

Paralelly, contacting my father at the hospital was also very difficult, for the same reason. We relied on overworked medical workers to call and be able to exchange messages, but it wasn't always easy, with interrupted connections and limited availability. Technology allowed me to say goodbye to my father before he passed away, but also made him unable to use the same codes to reach out while he was still alive, to contact me when or if he wanted to.

The role of technology in the Covid pandemic has been fundamental, giving me and my family the privilege to connect while also deeply frustrating us with its deficiencies. It has given us a broken connectedness, increasing our powerlessness at times, and lifting us up at other times. During the pandemic, technologies have been tremendously helpful to avoid our isolation, but they have also become a big source of stress for the people who can’t access them or have trouble understanding them –especially in moments in which the possibility of connection will determine how you'll live for the rest of your life. 

The pandemic also added a deeper public awareness about invisibilized social groups and their relation or access to technology. Digital access takes the biggest toll on underprivileged social groups. This pandemic has evidenced how ableism, digital accessibility and ageism play a major role in current societies. The public discourse during Covid has treated their lives as disposable, and collective discourses of care haven’t seeked enough ways to avoid leaving them behind. Low-income families have also struggled with it, with libraries and sources of connections being shut down. Digital access or the lack of it has made certain social groups have to undergo loss and social life in absolute isolation, with a lack of understanding how to communicate and how to use younger generations' tools, or maybe being simply unable to connect because of a lack of means. Most of our societies still depend on physical reach for many occasions, and when this is not available, the struggle is erratic and clunkier.

A few semantic legends exist in ancient cartography for describing unfamiliar territories: “Here Be Dragons”, a medieval slogan taken from a 15th Century map, or the description “Here Lions Abound”, from a 1025CE map. Still nowadays we ignore if these phrases situated in the margins of the cartographies were warnings or attempts to map danger zones. The map of now is similar: we don’t know which kind of land is left for us to explore after Covid. There might be lions, or dragons, or none, depending on what happened to us while the pandemic lasted, and how we could deal with it. The only sure thing is that we’ll have to navigate it and make a collective effort to contest the borderlands, to shape it better than we found it.