Good Grief, And The Bad

I felt irritable all day yesterday but worked for twelve hours. I sat down to watch a late night documentary with my partner and after reading the latest- 1000 deaths, and I cried. It came in heaves and rivers. I thought about the 32 year old man who died alone in a Queens hospital, his eyes filled with the terror the nurse said. I thought about the images of the Italians who passed. One older man’s smile stuck out in my mind. He looked so warm, so kind. I imagined him as a young man, equally warm and friendly but with darker hair, loving to his wife. I felt the sensation that I couldn’t breathe. I’m sure many of us are feeling that right now. The tightness in the chest, thick throated, wondering if our lungs will at some point will be filled with fluid and unable to hold air, like our neighbors. This is grieving. I read somewhere that grief manifests in the lungs. How ironic for this moment. This is painful. It’s a great mass grieving and a grieving for whats to come. It feels endless. This is what it felt like when my dad died. Endless hurt and emptying. But I have to remember, that that suffering did subside though I get pangs of it from time to time. During that time, one comforting thought I had, was that this pain was universal, not unique to me. It was a shared suffering that every human will at some point feel it, the difference then was that it was my time to feel it. Now it’s all of our time, grieving together. Not knowing who will next. But it doesn’t matter really. We are all equally vulnerable right now to the grief. And the one thing we can do for one another and ourselves- is to express it.