More than COVID-19.

💙✊🏻
What if COVID-19 wasn’t the only thing?

A friend was recently diagnosed with cancer. She has six children under the age of 11. Real life, non-COVID things are still happening.

But now real life has to live in the middle of this new thing. This strange thing, called a worldwide pandemic.

My husband died almost 11 months ago.

And every day I feel something.
They call it grief. And it looks like a lot of things.
Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I feel down. Sometimes I am empty. Sometimes I just want to remember. Lots of times I laugh from a memory. Sometimes I talk to him. Sometimes I just want Coleman to have his dad here. Sometimes I want to tell him something.

Most of the time I’m pretty good. I feel peace and love.

All those grieving things still happen.
But now we are also consumed by the coronavirus, too.

My grief is working to find a new home in the middle of self-isolation and remote learning and cleared schedules.

I want to have carpool and lacrosse practice to give my grieving day structure.
It helped me.
Now my grief wanders, unsure of where to land.
It’s confused as it searches for its home, the spaces and time where it used to live. I feel it there, bigger in some ways but a little out of sorts. Wondering where it should go, what it should look like, how it should feel.

I want to be isolated with Jason.
I want to share funny toilet paper memes and do church as a family.
I want him to help when the school computer program doesn’t work.
I want to talk about the news with him and decide things together.
I want him to tell me I’m awesome because we are prepared with food.
I want him to hang out with Coleman as he shoots hoops in the neighbor’s driveway or make up weird quarantine activities with him.
I want him to do this with us.
But he still isn’t here.
The grief is, though.

Grief is still happening in the middle of a pandemic.
So, I’m trying to be gentle with it.
I’m trying to listen to it.
I’m trying to let it find it’s way into new places within me.
I’m trying to not expect something different than what it is working to do.

COVID-19 is not the only thing that is happening right now.
And that’s ok.
We can do both.
✊🏻💙