boost: Schalk on Grief Complicated by Estrangement

[jesse_the_k]

Dr Sami Schalk is a disability studies scholar and professor in Gender and Women Studies at my local university. She’s been estranged from her family, which has complicated grieving seven COVID deaths. I was moved by her essay in our state’s queer monthly:

The Echo Chamber of Pandemic Grief

In retrospect, this post was when I began to make the connections between how grieving during the pandemic was reopening old wounds, echoing other forms of grief I still held: grief for the loss of family connections as a queer person which I felt even more heavily as one of the only people in my family to leave the Kentucky/Ohio area, who now literally could not return because it was (again) unsafe for me to be there; grief for my younger self who suffered so much shame in the context of my religious community, yet as an adult found deep nostalgic comfort in listening to the songs I used to sing in church even as I no longer believed in any of it. Everywhere I turned this new grief found ways to stir up old ones, all of them bouncing around loudly inside my chest.

[… snip …]

I know that all grief is slow and non-linear, but the pandemic has put a pause on certain kinds of mourning practices while keeping us in an echo chamber of collective grief. It is exhausting. I am exhausted. I feel like I am waiting for something to happen first for me to fully mourn, but I don’t know what that something is—the end of the pandemic? Seeing my family again? Going to my grandfather’s actual grave? I don’t know. I don’t know.

https://ourliveswisconsin.com/article/the-echo-chamber-of-pandemic-grief/ ​