Mourning 2020
By: Sybil Sanchez
Tags: Authenticity, Grief, Covid 19, Self Improvement, New Year

Mourning 2020

2020 is dead; Long live something better. Please?

I find myself quoting Shakespeare a lot lately, and I’m probably not the only one.

Whether it’s the Bard, the Bible, or your Bubbie, everyone needs wisdom these days.

What We Are Mourning

When the pandemic started, there was a spate of articles about mourning the loss of our current reality and adapting to the slow-motion, ongoing crisis. I recently did a quick search, expecting to see a revival of that topic since we’re about to close out the year. I haven’t seen much, so I figured I’d chime in.

It’s a new decade but also a new epoch that has yet to be fully defined. We must face it; as the virtual ball drops, something more than just this year is passing into that good night.

What are we mourning exactly? I imagine each of us has our own items but that we have a lot in common. To name a few:

Work (too much or too little)

Money (global crises are expensive)

Health (getting COVID, avoiding COVID, other conditions; weight gain, anyone?)

Family & friends (if not due to COVID, then politics, mental health, being shut in with them, being separated from them)

Education (and, how’s your 5-year-old doing with online learning?)

Household management (has everyone got their corner of the house well-marked? are you still paying your housekeeper? or, cleaning up after everyone, while working and surviving? how’s online delivery going?)

The personal impact is the stuff our lives are made of, but of course, there’s public affairs too, and this is no small thing:

The economy (spiking at 14.7% in April, the US unemployment rate is currently 6.7%, let’s all spend that $600 wisely now!)

Social unrest (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace tracks it all by country online; while it’s sadly a common public dynamic in some places, it’s new to the US and it’s freaking us all out)

Our government (January 20th can’t come soon enough, that’s where I stand)

Public health (to mask or not to mask, to gather or not to gather; come on people, isolate and stop the spread already!)

Eulogy for 2020 and Prayer for 2021

Just months before COVID spread, grief expert David Kessler published a book on how finding meaning is the sixth stage of grief.

The other five are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These can happen and recur in any given order, they are neither sequential nor finite.

As we head into the final, brutal blow of the holidays, here’s my eulogy for 2020 and prayer for 2021. I hope it will inspire us each to seek the meaning we need to make it through and come out in a healthier and more grounded way next year.

I have a sense of the ever-elusive enoughness. A glimpse of something around the corner. That which you can’t see when you view it head-on. A feeling that resists quantification. A surrendering or easing without definition.

Form without externally imposed boundaries, that’s enoughness. I am glad I can be grateful in this moment for it.

I invite enoughness to stay with me while I pursue my life in 2021. In the hegemony of task management and the instinct for control, may it bring me ease of flow. And in my relationship with my self and others, may it bring me renewed, reflexive compassion.