Below are two excerpts from The Next Day, which is about grieving over a lost vocation. The Next Day is currently available for free on my online shop. And, remember, as a paid subscriber you can order a free copy of any other e-book as well. Just reply to this email and tell me which one you want.
Some different types of grief
Apart from just (just?) straightforward grief, there are some other forms of grief that I have come across in my reading. These are all types of grief that are problematic, where the healthy grieving process has been inhibited somehow.
Frozen grief
Frozen grief is where the person who needs to mourn has, for some reason, not been able to start or progress their grieving process.
During the lockdowns of 2020, friends and ex-colleagues of mine were discussing their anticipated exit from the university sector. They were on fixed-term contracts and pretty sure that, given the huge numbers of job losses and funding cuts that looked to drive far-reaching structural change in the sector, when their contracts finished then they wouldn’t be renewed and, perhaps, they wouldn’t get another job at a university. Ever. They considered themselves to be better off than casual employees they knew who had already been dispatched. Employees on permanent contracts were not necessarily safe from being made redundant, either. My friends felt the necessity of planning their next move but they were so busy with their work, so overwhelmed with the demands of working in a restructuring organisation (among grief-stricken colleagues), that they didn’t have time to come to terms with the enormity of the change imposed on their lives. One friend called this “delayed processing.”
Other people may have been unceremoniously dumped from their jobs or (in the case of contractors or sole-traders) from projects or contracts due to the speed with which the pandemic lockdowns slammed our economy. These people may have been launched into a frantic scramble to secure money to live on or to negotiate reductions in rent payments. They may have found themselves dealing with an overwhelmed Job Services Australia to get onto welfare (always a dismal experience).
And then there were the people who, on top of their loss, were supporting children, partners, parents, or other dependents who were facing their own challenges during lockdown. Who had the time or energy to do all of this AND THEN pick apart complex and challenging emotions over their own sense of loss?
“A psychologist friend of mine talks about the idea of frozen grief, a phenomenon that occurs when people are denied the normal communal rituals associated with grieving, meaning that their feelings cannot be expressed or processed.”
So writes James Bradley in his beautiful article As I Mourn my Mother the Pandemic Rolls On. Is the Whole World, Like Me, Frozen in Grief? He also writes:
“Grief is always isolating. It cuts us off from the world, confines us in ourselves. Yet, as I watched the people I know on social media and elsewhere trying to express the confusion they felt at being pitched into a world where they were suddenly vulnerable and alone, it was hard not to wonder whether this wasn’t also a kind of frozen grief.”
This sense of vulnerability and disorientation, due to being suddenly jettisoned out of locked down and / or downsizing sectors, and also in the face of perhaps inadequate government support, is what I felt I had been witnessing in friends and ex-colleagues in the arts and university sectors.
Bradley goes on to write:
“… like all of us I feel undone, unmade, as if time has been suspended and the world I know is gone. As if I am falling, and have not yet hit the ground.”
People who have been yanked out of their work, who have witnessed their sectors shut down, who are fretting about how they are going to pay next month’s rent while keeping their dreams alive must be wondering which way is up. Some of them will have hit the ground with a psyche-shattering thud, some will feel like they are still falling. How many have had the time – the respite from surviving – to know how to articulate what all of this means to them?
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