Pandemic Ponderings: How do we manage Isolation, Loss, and Change?

My dear friend Laura launched a podcast, Shelter in Place, in mid March 2020 as the pandemic became a daily realty for us here in the USA. The Bay Area shut down schools and many of my neighbors were left without work or any childcare help. Life as we knew it was in upheaval.

Then we got into a rhythm. We learned how to do meet in a socially distanced way, online or when it was safe, masked and distanced. But all the while in the background we were acknowledging (sometimes directly sometimes indirectly), the change that has occurred because of this pandemic and the lives that have been lost.

It is now late January 2021 and we have been doing this for nearly a year. The death count as of today is over 406,000 Americans lost due to COVID 19, a number that continues to grow. The losses that have touched me so deeply have been the deaths of the people my friends and clients have loved. When I hear their stories of loss, it feels like a loss of my own, somehow a face to the countless lives behind the growing number of COVID deaths nation- and worldwide. And also a very personal, very intimate change in their life.

I recorded something for Laura at her request, a “party” that she hosted on her podcast to talk about the complexities of this last year. I spoke of my grief, the changes our family has gone through, and the complexity I feel it has brought out in my humanity. Take a listen. I share in the “lament” room but I encourage you to take a listen to the whole episode and experience each of the rooms of the “party” that Laura hosted. I hope it can be a healing balm or a way to recognize something in yourself that you had not seen before.

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