Coping mechanisms: The pandemic guide to grieving

A person’s response to life in a pandemic can mirror the five stages of grief, with varying results, depending on how they deal with each emotion as it unfurls.

The idea of the five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — was first suggested by Swiss-American psychiatrist Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969.

“With the pandemic, of course, denial could see you catch the virus and get very ill or worse. Anger and anxiety have sort of overlapped with the other emotions, because the sources of anxiety are so varied, changeable and, in many ways, seem here to stay at least for the short term,” says clinical psychologist Shreya Varma.

Here, the sense of loss of control is more extreme. It’s not just that you couldn’t control someone else’s fate; it’s that, in more ways than usual, you can’t begin to predict your own.

Bargaining becomes part of the survival technique — no one can isolate completely, and so you try to draw a line that allows you to function, and tell yourself that will suffice.

The instinct for self-preservation means that at some point a person will begin to adapt. At which point they must face the many ways in which their world has changed.

“We are grieving, in a way, the loss of the world we knew before,” says Varma. “There’s a reality to what we have lost — the loss of an external world, the loss of our daily lives, the loss of stability.”

As with grief, each stage can take its toll on your closest relationships. Spouses and partners who are in different phases will feel gears grate — one may be in the acceptance phase of the cycle, the other still angry and impatient.

“With the stages of loss and grief, a recommended therapy is spending time away from it all, seeking out a break in routine, a retreat. That option is not really available now either,” Varma says.

In such a world, it helps to address what one has lost, recreate parts of the lost routine that it is possible to recreate, Varma says. Reach out to the people that matter to you, no matter how different or insufficient the experience feels.

“We should name the losses so we can accept that this is where we are. List the good that remains and move on to constructive rebuilding,” Varma adds. “It’s a new world we are all braving right now. In it, we can strive to create something meaningful here and now. We can strive to adapt.”

Or we can just be patient with ourselves and others, remembering that it is a pandemic. It is enough just to survive.