A Pandemic Grief that turned Pandemic

A Pandemic Grief that turned Pandemic by Lois Bushong

Blogs, podcasts and webinars on dealing with grief have been posted on the internet throughout the pandemic. This blog will, using some of my own story, cover the added complexity of grief experienced by the Third Culture Kid (TCK) during Covid losses due to the many layers of loss they have already experienced beginning in childhood, the challenges of sharing their grief authentically with others who don’t understand the TCK experience, and some tools to come along the TCK in any of these losses.

I lost my 94-year-old father to Covid in 2020, so I am one of those dealing with grief during this season of worldwide grief. Yet, I find myself avoiding shows on this most emotional topic of processing grief well. It isn’t only the pain of losing my dad which is hard, but even more so the memories surrounding the last weeks of his life that in many ways mirror the feelings of isolation and loneliness experienced in the multiple losses that characterized my life both as a child and still now as an adult TCK.

My Dad was one of the many residents of nursing homes whose access to the outside world, and especially family, was cut off due to the rampant spread of Covid, particularly among the elderly who were so fragile in their health. As a result, when I went to visit him every few days, I could only wave or try to communicate through his window, but because he was hard of hearing and had lost most of his eyesight, due to old age, he recognized me only once during those long, lonely weeks. It ripped my heart out at how alone and confused he must have felt by my seeming abandonment of him during his severe illness and impending death. The nurse tried to communicate to him that I was just outside the window, but only once did he comprehend I was there. The day he died my niece, a licensed nurse practitioner, was able to get into the facility and she helped me say my goodby to him as she held her cell phone close to his ear. However, because Dad was strongly sedated I don't believe he heard us. It was gut wrenching to not be able to provide support and care for him in person during his final weeks and hours, although I was most grateful that a caring nurse in the Covid wing was with him at his time of death. As I talk to others who lost family members during the pandemic I have come to the realization that we all share the suffocating weight of these experiences of unresolved grief. Someday, I hope I can talk about Dad’s dying alone in the nursing home without tearing up.

It also causes me to reflect on my ongoing, often overpowering grief from the aloneness I experienced as a TCK in boarding school beginning at the age of nine. I wonder if my parents experienced a parallel feeling of being figuratively “just on the other side of the window with me” in their thoughts, often thinking of me, wondering how I was doing, but I did not know they were there. How many hours or days were they “waving to me or holding up a heart poster with my name on it” through the metaphoric window trying to remind me that they had not forgotten me? How often did I needlessly go through the loneliness of believing I was alone in whatever challenge I was facing that day? Perhaps they were right there in their hearts, but I could not hear their voices or see their faces because they weren’t physically or even verbally with me for months at a time.

That is what makes any current grief for many adult TCKs so intense, that feeling that no one completely understands what we are going through in our more complex grief process, due to the multiple layers of loss over many years. The typical cycle of grief just doesn’t fit. The emotions of the current grief may in addition also take us back to these same powerful emotions experienced as a child or even as an adult when a dear friend, often another TCK, has moved to different state or a far-off country or has died. When others without the understanding of this complex grief experienced by TCKs try to provide comfort, often their words sound trite or hollow. It’s almost as if the sound of their words fades away into the air while the intensity of the previous uniquely TCK losses continues to radiate throughout our beings.

I explore this vast topic of grief in TCKs much more extensively in chapter four of my book, “Belonging Everywhere & Nowhere: Insights into Counseling the Globally Mobile”. There I flesh out the various types of grief experienced by TCKs, the likely areas of unresolved grief, why TCKs avoid the topic and how to walk through grief to the other side where we can leverage all we discovered about ourselves during this hard period of life.

I, like many TCKs, learned early in life not to show my pain resulting from the grief of having lost a dear friend who moved, or a homeland or a cross-cultural lifestyle because we moved. I did not want someone to say the wrong thing and add a secondary wound into my world of not feeling understood. I kept the grief card close to my chest and didn’t reveal it until much later in life. I didn't want to be angry at someone that I knew really was trying to comfort me but just didn’t know what to say. I saw the big hearts of some who were really trying hard but their words clogged my process of healing. And some didn’t even try to say the right thing. They just wanted me to move on and stop talking about it as it made them uncomfortable. Emotions and grief are messy and can be like an emotional landmine with a short fuse. Words can either be the active ingredient to set it off or aid to deactivate it. It takes understanding of this “messiness” to have the courage and skill to come alongside a grieving TCK in a helpful, healing manner.

There are those armchair therapists who insist we TCKs grieve just like they did. We must follow their time clock or follow the “Stages of Grief” developed by Kubler-Ross in an orderly fashion. They come out with a diagnosis such as, “You are in Stage Three (depression) of the Grief Cycle.” It’s easy to get irritated when a well-meaning friend hands you a book or recommends a conference and empathetically says, “This will mend your sorrows.” Or the obnoxious friend who wants to verbally kick you in the butt and tell you, “It’s time you are over this,” or “Just go back to wherever you came from since you hate it here so much,” whichever country that might be! That’s the problem for a TCK; we don’t know in which country we do belong! Where is home? Who are our loved ones that don’t/won’t move away, at least emotionally? It’s not as simple for us TCKs as it is for others who have not experienced the significant number and many kinds of loss, which once again adds to the belief, “I am alone in my grief and there isn’t anyone who can relate.” This may understandably cause us to go another degree lower into depression. It is said that the more we have loved a place or a person, the deeper the grief. David Kessler, a grief expert, states, ‘Love and grief are a package deal; you can’t have one without the other.” Even some therapists don’t understand the complexity of the TCK’s grief due to all of the often unseen or unrecognized layers of loss.

What helps me, the TCK? First and foremost, it is to remember that what might help one TCK may not help the second TCK. I am unique as a TCK and I am unique from other TCKs. I have my own story, participants in my life, transitions, moves and emotional makeup. I have my own grief which just might be different than that of the next TCK. Therefore, the number one thing you can do is really LISTEN to me take the time to really process my stories of life in a far off land that you may not be able to relate to. But you can still take the time to listen attentively and with care. Also, don’t assume my story or emotional makeup is the same as your grief story.

Second, let me know you FEEL with me. Validate my losses, my pain, even though perhaps markedly different than yours. Use active listening, look at me, cry with me and hug me. I need to feel your heart grieve with mine. Third, it’s helpful to understand that my pain can change during different seasons of life. RIDE THE WAVES with me. Some days my stories are filled with humor, other days with with wisdom and knowledge seemingly useless to my current living situation, and other days chucked full of trauma, anxiety or depression. Learn to accept these varied emotions as part of my complex TCK experience and be with me in whichever one I’m experiencing that day without thinking I am messed up. Fourth, let me know that you are present with me and you are not going away. STAY connected emotionally to me at whatever level of commitment is realistic for you and let me know what that level is. Disappearing suddenly physically or emotionally reactivates all of the old grief and adds a new grief to my story.

This pattern of continual relationship losses due to the TCK lifestyle of many moves of our own family and of the families of others our parents were working with results in unresolved grief: yet another person who touched my heart deeply moved away, sometimes without a proper goodby. This is why my heart breaks. If you must physically move, talk about if and how you will stay connected in spite of the distance. And if you won’t be able to stay connected after the move, take the time to celebrate our relationship together, recall the special times, the impact we had on each other, and what you will remember about our relationship; say a meaningful goodbye that gives us both the gift of treasuring all our relationship gave us both for the time we had together. TCKs are great at navigating this challenge of goodbyes as we have done it our entire lives. But we will not be vulnerable to share emotionally during the goodby unless you do. Instead, we will shut down emotionally and pull that grief card back into our chest.

To understand the additional layers of loss for TCKs it is important to understand the significance of not only losing the important people who moved away but the massive loss and change that occurred when our families moved to a new country. Everything was lost, from the familiar streets to the open market with its own smells, my mountains, my home, my local friends, my school, clear down to the green mangoes that are no longer available in my backyard. Very few losses in life are as complete and overwhelming as moving to a whole new country, and many TCK’s have to make this transition from country to country multiple times in our lives.

Trying to carry on a relationship with a close friend after one of you has moved to a different country is so similar to trying to carry on my relationship with my dying father only through the window of a nursing home. It might look like a caring, normal relationship, but it takes real commitment and adjustment to carry on well in a different way since you no longer have the dimensions of sight and sound and touch. The TCK will experience much very real raw emotion because we wonder if we can go through this significant loss one more time. It reminds me of a Bible verse which I believe accurately describes the metaphor of my window, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known”. (I Corinthians 13:12 NIV) Dad was not able to see me through the window, even though I was there. I look forward to that day in heaven, when the window will be gone and he will know me, his daughter, once again. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in the same place all one’s life and only lose important people occasionally, at the times of normal transitions like graduations, and weddings, and they are still able to come back and celebrate with you at special occasions.

Yes, I carry a boatload of grief today due to death of my father during the pandemic and the ongoing news of others who have lost loved ones. Thus, my childhood griefs are triggered again and again and I’ve had to use this unusual situation to take a look at the unresolved areas of my childhood grief. It’s been difficult but good work.

At the same time I recognize that none of us gets over our grief soon, or on a preplanned schedule. We must walk through it, taking the time to process it again and again when it catches us unaware at unexpected times and situations. Taking the time to grieve well is important, productive, healing work we all must engage in during this long Covid season, and even more so for TCKs. At the same time, Covid has caused this last year to also be a long season of isolation. This has forced us all to learn to develop a very different support system since the regular techniques were not allowed during the pandemic. I, like many singles, was alone in my home for months, a very different type and intensity of isolation than most of us have ever experienced. In addition, we had to have a virtual funeral for my dad, as did most families during Covid. Other impacts on me that help illustrate the fatigue and loss we all are experiencing are the following: I tried to connect with friends over an internet service which could be strange and spotty at times. My schedule was thrown out the window. I consumed too much food and watched too much television. Sleeping patterns were harder to maintain....not the sort of things the experts tell me I should be doing in order to deal with my grief. It has been a most untypical season of grief—for us all.

And as a TCK, dealing with the layers of many prior griefs of lost worlds, I haven’t gotten over it quickly either. It, too, is so untypical. I may spend too much time telling my wild stories, figuring out how to adjust to this whole new Covid world, not knowing what I don’t know, hiding in my head instead of getting in touch with my feelings, excelling in my career at the detriment of my personal life, or continuing to run from place to place or lose myself. I continue to uncover new layers of grief; it is pandemic, worldwide!

But what happens if I don’t acknowledge it? It all eventually catches up to me. If I don’t grieve I lose my authentic self. I am not able to risk being vulnerable or be truly honest with those who are the closest to me. Others will feel that our connection isn’t genuine. True intimacy in relationships becomes a problem.

Kessler said that there is one additional step beyond the steps of processing grief developed by Kubler-Ross. That is the step of MEANING. (“Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief” by David Kessler) Meaning is what I do after I have walked through my grief. In an interview he did with Ryan Howes for the Psychology Networker magazine (“The Grief we Hold-Loving in the midst of Loss” by Ryan Howes, March/April 2021, pg. 69-71) he made the statement, “The meaning I found in the death of a friend was, ‘it gives us permission to be our authentic selves.” What is the meaning you have gained after this year of pandemic grief or in your TCK grief the size of a pandemic?

The meaning I have found for my TCK grief and my Covid grief is to learn to be daily more fully present to celebrate my many loving relationships and to feel the pain of the grief of those I love. Paradoxically but powerfully, during the isolation of a worldwide pandemic I learned to let our shared grief be transformed into wonderfully more intimate relationships.

Taking the time to process this question of meaning may be the biggest benefit each of us take from these long months of Covid isolation, ongoing change, and loss. I encourage you to take the time to process for yourself and others the layers of grief caused or triggered by Covid. And if you have a TCK in your circle of relationships, I trust that my story and tips for understanding TCKs will assist you in loving them well.