Carrying Unprocessed Grief

 In a world where sadness unfelt, as Danny Pellegrino put it, in his novel How Do I Un-Remember This?,” we can see that processing “unfelt (sadness)” is almost a taboo. In more ways than we know, the world around us tend to say we can and should take a couple of days to process said grief. But when it comes to anything exceeding those couple of days, we see that we are questioned for our actions pertaining to that grief, and thus, become stigmatized for feeling too sad, or “emotional.”

Just saying we need to do better is not enough. Our community is dealing with things like poverty; inequitable levels of society that their counterparts have put them in; and even notable items like food inequality and scarceness.

I go back to a time when my grandmother had passed from COVID-19, and my boss said something like, “of course you should be with your family,” upon learning of said news of her passing. However, once I got there, she was already gone of course, but I felt an enormous amount of guilt for not being there prior to my g-ma’s passing. And on top of that, once I got there, my boss had pestered me (over text, but still) about when I was returning, so she had an idea of how many days she would have to work solely alone, or at least on projects by herself. A lot of things come to mind when I think about my grandma. First of all, she was a harsh, sometimes cruel person to her family, myself included. But on the other hand, you could tell she was hurt a lot in her lifetime…

For things I will not mention, to protect her legacy, I will say she did get on my nerves quite a bit. Mainly because during the George Floyd trials, she had no idea why I was protesting and things as such, but also she just had this major concern for my well-being… which I can appreciate.

My grandma died of COVID-19 in June of 2021. She was ignorant in a lot of ways, but also had a heart of gold that many people found her very giving and a very kind soul. Which I did agree with most of the time… I digress.

In the US, we have these stigmas that show us just how harsh and cruel we can be to eachother. We need to be more kind, let people take as much time (funded of course) as they need, to recover from the loss. We too often see that hurt people hurt people. We need to stop these cycles on an individual level, as well as national, and global level. We will just simply keep perpetuating these cycles of unprocessed grief to our future generations to come. How is that fair to them?

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