Loss and Grief in the pandemic

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

There is a day in the process of obtaining one’s PhD that’s considered very important: the day the supervisor, after consulting with the rest of the PhD committee, after several reviews of the dissertation, sends out an email to the Faculty of Graduate Studies saying: ‘this person is ready to defend’.

The day they send out this email is a big day in the life of any doctoral candidate because it means that the supervisory committee believes that the research and all the arguments presented in the dissertation are well thought out, clearly explained and the research can be defended.

It’s a wonderful day…I think…I don’t really know…that didn’t happen for me…

My supervisor did send out that email, since it’s a matter of procedure but it was such a bittersweet moment that I will never be able to untangle the bitterness of that day.

On the day my supervisor sent that email, my uncle died of Covid.

My uncle died, and Covid spread like wild-fire in my family in Iran. My grandpa would die 4 days later after my uncle’s death, and one of my other uncles would be hospitalized in the ICU for about a week, with most of that time us feeling a sense of touch-and-go with his health.

Those days are so foggy to me. I forget how foggy grief can be. How far it takes us, removing us from our surrounding and plunging us into its depth where we reel in pain for the love we lost.

We didn’t know he had Covid. He didn’t know he had Covid. But he was coughing. He was coughing and not going to the doctor. He was coughing and my family still got together to have a meal with each other. He was coughing and his younger daughter who lives outside of Iran, begged him to go to the doctor. He went to two doctors and they both told him that he had a cold and one prescribed antibiotics! Antibiotics for a virus! A ridiculous notion that defies my limited knowledge of bacteria versus viruses, and it weakened his already weak immune system.

When he and the rest of the family realized it was bad, it was already too late. He went to the bathroom and collapsed. His oxygen levels were so low that he passed out. With so much difficulties they found him an ICU bed.

The last video that we have of him is him breathing from an oxygen tube, smiling, and waving to my cousin as the ICU door closed on him. I always remember him smiling.

The night before he died, I was talking to his younger daughter. I was trying to be optimistic and with my optimism I was trying to will into existence that he would get better. A big part of me believed that he would get better. My cousin and I talked for hours that night about how he would get better and after he gets released from the hospital what should be put in place for his recovery. We were so sure…so sure that death from Covid wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly affect us…another ridiculous idea…but I guess sometimes you have to hold-on to ridiculous ideas to keep a bit of sanity.

The next day, I was in training and had told some folks that I might have to leave if things get bad.

My other cousin called me around mid-day and I missed it. When I went to call him in a few minutes, he wasn’t picking up. I don’t know who I called next. I don’t remember the order of calls…my sisters?…my father?…my mother?…my cousins?… I don’t remember.

I remember a frenzy, fear circulating around me, and remembering whoever I spoke with wasn’t telling me the whole truth…perhaps they didn’t know the whole story at that point…Or perhaps I couldn’t hear the truth…I remember crying…why was I already crying when I wasn’t sure? I guess the heart knows the truth what the mind rationalizes away.

The story was that he had stopped breathing in the ICU and the doctors were trying to revive him. Would a hospital in an emergency situation call a family member to say, ‘oh we are in the middle of this life-and-death situation, we just wanted to keep you in the loop’?

Perhaps my family couldn’t even comprehend what was happening. Perhaps they were being told that he had died but for them first hearing it, it might have sounded like ‘he died and we are trying to bring him back’. Isn’t it one of the conditions of grief that the shock makes us believe that maybe the death is a lie and maybe the person will come back?

I packed to go and be with my father, just so that he would have someone with him, still not knowing for sure whether my uncle Mehdi had died, but thinking that he might die soon. Right before leaving, I gave another cousin of mine a call and just asked her point-blank to please tell me: “Did Amoo Mehdi die?” to which she said crying, “Yes Sara Amoo Mehdi died!” I remember that clearly.

I sat in the car and my cousin and I cried together.

I remember being worried for my other cousin, uncle Mehdi’s younger daughter, whom I had just spoken with the night before, she who was so far away from her family. She didn’t know yet and in the chaos of the first few hours of his death, no one could bring themselves to tell her, including her husband who was devastated himself.

Amoo Mehdi

Those days and weeks after my uncle’s death were a cloudy fog.

After he died, we learnt that all my uncles had Covid, all my aunts, my cousins, and my grandparents had developed Covid. My grandpa went into a coma shortly after and died in his sleep. My cousin would later tell me that because of the severity of the Covid situation and the collapse of the healthcare and the burial system, no one was able to come to prepare the body for burial. That preparation (which involves washing the body) was placed squarely on the shoulders of my cousin and one of my uncles, both of whom were also dealing with Covid.

My dad would wonder out loud if he should go to Iran and then talk himself out of that idea.

We wanted to grieve together, we wanted to and needed to be together and we couldn’t do that. One of the most primal needs of us humans is to be with each other in pain and joy and Covid robbed us of that.

My cousin was able to fly back to Tehran for her father’s funeral. But she couldn’t hug her mother and her older sister because they both had contracted Covid. If she got Covid too, she wouldn’t be able to fly back. They all stood apart at the funeral with government health-care personnel being present in the cemetery and ordering people to maintain distance from each other. Most of the close family members couldn’t even attend the small funeral because they were all sick and many of the other family members and friends who were able to attend couldn’t because of pandemic rules.

The funeral was small, with a handful of people in a corner of the cemetery that was dedicated to Covid victims.

I have learnt something about death: when it can’t be mourned collectively, when it is not witnessed and us witnessing it is not seen by others, something of the shock and the inability to comprehend that the person is dead lingers.

I still hear my uncle calling me “my flower daughter” as he called his own daughters and all his nieces.

My uncle was a flower himself.

He was the middle son in the family of five sons. He loved to sing, dance, and enjoy life. He was a teacher and one of the things he taught me was practicing happiness through music and dance.

I miss him. And I also miss not being able to mourn him with the rest of my family as he deserved.