Repurposing our lives in a suspended state of grief

Photo Credit: McCullough Family Archives

“We are worrying along,” my grandmother Mama Joe wrote to her sister Till, a Norwegian farmer’s wife living in Wisconsin during the summer of 1943. My grandparents had recently lost their son John, a 22-year-old VMI graduate, one of their four boys who volunteered to fight in WWII.

His P-40 Warhawk nosedived and crashed during training a month before my mother turned 10. When Mama Joe wrote Till, from her home in Birmingham, Alabama, that spring, she’d been sorting through my uncle’s winter clothes.

In her letter, Mama Joe mentioned she’d packed a box of John’s clothes to send to Till.

“I don’t care what you do with it, but someone could get some use out of it” she wrote in reference to a jacket. “You could use it for carpet rags, if you are making a heavy rug.” Mama Joe continued, “I feel very much in the dumps and let down, but have to pull out of it some time. I just can’t think of John without going all to pieces, but so many people have the same grief, and there’s so much sorrow everywhere.”

And that’s where we are again today: grief and sorrow everywhere. Caught within the whirlwind of this continuing pandemic and recession, we quickly learned to re-purpose the material at hand into something useful when much needed equipment was missing or faulty.

Early on, we watched videos on Youtube or Facebook about converting men’s underwear, women’s bras, and Maxi pads with “wings” into face masks.

We cheered on teenage boys in Washington state who created a website tracing the virus and marveled at engineers who converted CPAC machines to ventilators. We wept watching our frontline soldiers – doctors, nurses and hospital staff, as well as first responders, risk their lives without proper equipment as our president tilted at the windmills in his head – Democrats, the media, the Deep State and scientists.

We revisited the idea of Victory gardens (45 percent of food production at the end of WWII came from Victory gardens) and remarked the greatest generation sent their finest and bravest to the front lines and all we expected of ours was to binge watch Netflix and spend more time snap-chatting.

That’s not necessarily fair to say when I’ve witnessed the deferred dreams and dislocation of my son, a college senior sent home to finish school online without a proper graduation ceremony, whose early years were clouded by 9/11 and a global recession. We wondered why we couldn’t pull together a national response like rebuilding the entire Navy fleet after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Back then, we even temporarily allowed for the shape-shifting of women’s roles before we sent them back to the kitchen when the war ended. Alas, we have no FDR to manifest our collective pride and patriotism into a unified response to this existential threat.

So, in our strange new world, we continue the conversation about social distancing, community spread, and community tracing. We Zoom into book club gatherings, Alanon meetings, business conferences, and virtual cocktail hour.

As we navigate different stages of re-opening and rising waves of infection, the loss and uncertainty of this pandemic feels as if we’re forever in a loved one’s closet sifting through the remnants of their lives after the funeral. Our former way of life still haunts us, much like the death of someone we love, but the way we used to live and grieve has seemingly vanished.

During this global crisis when even the rites and rituals of death are stolen from us, how do we live with this new strain of grief? How do we continue to refashion our lives differently as we experience in real time this perpetual pandemic?

When I talked to my 88-year-old mother on the phone during the official lockdown and I remarked on the starkness of what’s happening, she reiterated what Mama Joe used to tell her: “We must make our own sunshine.”

Now, as all our hearts are cracked wide open by grief and sorrow everywhere, she also reminds me of Mama Joe’s words, “This too shall pass,” and when it does, our lives will be repurposed like the clothes once worn by a vibrant young pilot with his life still ahead of him, and our hearts will be transmuted by our collective losses.