Gradations of Grief
A Look At Love During A Year of Loss
May 7, 2021
Photo by Marco Chilese
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the past year has been a wellspring of innumerable losses, with millions experiencing an erosion of normalcy, connectivity, ways of living and being. As a result of these losses, the inevitable grief that follows is part of what researchers have labeled “The Epidemic Within an Epidemic,” one that society is unequipped for.
Dr. Dan Wolfson, a psychologist specializing in grief and loss, says, “Grief is a reaction that impacts people in every facet of life — psychologically, emotionally, behaviorally, physiologically. It affects our thoughts, it can be quite intrusive and quite intense initially. Grief is also something that moves, and that moves naturally.”
With this in mind, it can manifest in various ways, some of which we may not recognize as grief — anger, trouble sleeping, stomach pain, withdrawing socially, and avoidance of certain places or doing certain things.
Dr. Wolfson elaborated further, noting that grief is not pathological, meaning it is not something we need to fix, and unlike certain forms of mental illness associated with grief, such as depression and anxiety, it is not to be treated as an illness. Rather than waiting for it to dissipate, it is something that we must adapt to and learn to live with.
“We continue to hold grief forever, it’s always going to be a part of us and nobody can take that away from you. But over time, and with the right support, it’s not going to feel as intense. There might always be a certain time where we miss the person or we feel that sadness, or whatever it might be, but it’s not going to be as intrusive and as debilitating as what we see during that initial time period,” he said.
Grief, he said, “can feel like you have molasses getting poured into every single one of your gears, and it just slows you down. It can feel like you’re kind of swimming and you keep getting hit by waves, and every time you pop your head up, another wave comes and crashes over you. At certain points, there’s a little bit more space between the waves, and you can keep your head up for longer and longer.”
Between the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020 and March 11, 2021, Google Trends Data showed a more than 5000% increase in searches for terms such as “grief,” “mourning,” and “grief during covid 19.” To better understand grief, the accounts of the bereaved featured in this project detail its nuances and dialects, the ways in which it appears in daily life and beyond.
The Voicemail
Dino Worrell, 54:
Dino Worrell is reminded of his mother at varying moments throughout his day — during his daily train rides, crossing certain streets, or simply hearing the word ‘mom’ uttered in passing. He and his family continue to experience the profound loss of Thelma Worrell, who died at 85 on December 5, 2020, as a result of health complications. The enduring and imposing nature of grief gives way to its oscillation, affecting him at random moments. “Every little move, every little moment, everything just totally gets kind of dim. It leaves an empty feeling within yourself,” he said.
His reverence and love for his mother are evident when he’s asked about her, heard clearly as he steadily recounted their relationship. “She loved me as a son and there was a lot that, while she was alive, we shared, we did, and I have great memories of that to live on. And she will continue to live in my heart forever,” he said without missing a beat, “Love you.”
Worrell keeps and cherishes two momentos of her: an anklet she wore for years until she passed and a voicemail she left him one year for his birthday. When he misses her, Worrell plays the recording of his mother singing ‘happy birthday.’ “It connects me to her knowing I won’t hear her voice again, but through that recording it’s possible,” he said.
For Worrell, grief is a painful, ongoing process — one that is difficult to accept, cope with, and explain. The most challenging aspects to grapple with, Worrell said, are the abrupt reminders of his mother’s absence. He remembers her when driving down 14th Street, the first place she and his father lived when they immigrated from Panama, and where he would take her to doctor’s appointments, as she grew older. He remembers her when he sees carnations, her favorite flower. He remembers that she was always willing to listen, that she was never too busy for anyone, that she was independent, always saying “If it’s not too much,” before asking for help.
“You normally would touch base or call her on a daily basis, but to see that… those things that you normally do on a daily basis, to reach out to her just to hear her voice and speak to her, you no longer could do it. Just to hear her voice, or stop by her house and to see her becomes so hard and emotional to do,” he said.
What anchors Worrell on a daily basis, however, is prayer. “I pray to God so he could give me the strength each and every day to move on,” he said, “because I believe once life ends on earth, it’s just the beginning of a new chapter with God and that’s the process for myself to try to move on and try to get a better comfort in that.”
The Breakfast Order
Kayla Worrell, 21:
During one of her final phone calls with her grandmother, as she slipped in and out of consciousness in her hospital bed, Kayla Worrell recalls her humor. “At that point, she remembered me and all she said was ‘Kayla, they have me in this nasty place’,” she said, “But before that, I don’t remember the last time that I went to her house and she remembered who I was, so it kind of made me regret that in that sense because I don’t remember the last time.”
Thelma Worrell was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s before her death and with restrictions on hospital visiting hours due to COVID-19, family visits were scarce, and her memory was fleeting. “When she got out of the hospital, we noticed she wasn’t the same. She couldn’t hold sentences, she would recognize people’s faces,” Worrell said, but she could no longer recognize her grandchildren.
During one visit, following her grandmother’s return home from the hospital, Worrell remembers her grandmother looking at, but not recognizing her. “My dad was like, ‘This is Kayla, it’s your granddaughter’ and she said, ‘I don’t know who she is,’ so at that moment, it was bothersome and it was disheartening.”
Despite this psychological and physical absence, Worrell memorizes a number of her grandmother’s traits and idiosyncrasies. “She was very firm and headstrong and I think that came with having five kids. She always put her foot down and when she made her mind up, there wasn’t any influencing her. She was also very observant, she would know just by someone’s demeanor if something was wrong,” she said.
More specifically, the memories of her grandmother transcend time and temporality, kept alive by the younger Worrell. “I remember her whenever I see IHOP. She always used to call it the house of pancakes and she had one specific order: two eggs over easy and one pancake,” she said, “We used to take her there sometimes on her birthday or just randomly whenever we stopped by because she loved it so much.” She reminisces fondly about one New Year’s Eve, “about four or five years ago, [when] we had no New Year’s plans and we just decided to show up at her house and she was so shocked and happy to be spending the New Year with me, my brother, and my parents because she was home alone.” Every New Year’s Eve since then, Worrell gets flashbacks of the memory.
For Worrell, grief comes in fits of tears, often amid the mundane moments of her everyday life, for reasons that she’s unable to identify. It comes when she listens to a sad song, when she sees pictures of her loved ones, and when she encounters intrusive thoughts on the impermanence of human life. “The other day, I looked at a picture of my younger brother and I saw he was getting older, and I just cried. Because I saw the picture and I saw him getting older and kind of how the whole situation played out where now I see everybody getting older and I’m more appreciative of them because I know that obviously, this is something that’s inevitable, but it’s easier to say that because we know it’s a process of life, as opposed to when you see something as that happened.”
Within her grief, Worrell would also find herself contemplating on the ‘what-ifs’. “In the beginning, I was a little bit angry at that,” she said, “because I felt like maybe… if she received better care, or maybe went to a different hospital or anything else, the outcome could have been different. I just want to know, is she, is she okay? Is she where she needs to be? Is she happy? Is she with her family, her mom and her dad, my great grandparents? All her siblings? She was the last sibling here on earth and so, I want to know, is everything full circle now? Is she with her family? Is she okay? Like is she happy?”
Four months after her grandmother’s death, Worrell and her family find solace in spending time together, in her grandparents’ home in St. Albans, Queens. “Going to her house when she had passed, we would spend a lot more time there with everybody. I’m closer with my cousins now and my aunts and my uncles. So I would say that that’s one coping mechanism, just being in the house, because we say she’s the matriarch of the family, so although she’s not physically here, we still feel her spirit in that house. That’s the house that she made, she called home and everybody was welcome.”
With grief, she said, “You have to feel it, and then you have to let it go for your sanity, for your mental health, but also, culturally from a Hispanic perspective, for the person’s soul, to let them rest completely. Feel it and then let it go.”
The Video Call
Vanessa Lucero, 22:
Vanessa Lucero wishes she hugged her grandmother harder during their last visit. She remembers their phone call, two days before her death, then calling her older sister to mentally prepare for the worst on December 4, 2020. By noon, Rosa Valdez Llivicura could no longer breathe, following three weeks of experiencing COVID-19 complications. She was 71 years old.
Following the news of her grandmother’s death, she said, “I just remembered all our moments together… that July from last year, I got drunk for the first time with my grandmother.” Lucero remembers drinking too much wine after a relative’s baptism. Even as she felt ill, she recalls her grandmother standing by, not once scolding her. During a car ride with her grandparents and her dad the next day, amidst a hangover, Lucero said, “She told me she only got drunk once in Ecuador and never again, I just remember laying on her shoulder and trying not to throw up at the moment.”
“She actually took care of me… She came and went out with me to get food and those pills, because I couldn’t stop throwing up. She was there. She was there for me and I can’t believe she was there the whole time,” she said.
Four days after her grandmother’s death, Lucero’s grandfather and Llivicura’s husband, Jose Quinto Fernandez, died at 73 from Covid complications in the hospital. Although the news of his death came as a shock, Lucero could no longer find it in her to cry. It was only several weeks after her grandparents’ deaths, following an argument with her mother, that she felt true catharsis. “Anger triggered it. I don’t even know why I started crying, but I cried all night. After that, the memories of them were on my mind and I kept crying and crying and I panicked. Then I started laughing a bit because I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she said.
Lucero frequently recounts the memory of celebrating her last birthday, on March 31, with her grandparents through a video call in the earliest days of the pandemic. “I never really got to celebrate my 21st birthday with them, but I knew I couldn’t celebrate it without them. But due to COVID, I didn’t want to risk it, so I kept putting it off. I never really celebrated, but that phone call was the best birthday gift,” she said, “It was just when the pandemic first started, everything closed down and we were all locked at home and their call just made it so much better. My grandfather, he was always a joker, he made me laugh and I felt like that made my birthday complete. And, you know, this year I won’t be able to do that.”
The loss of her grandparents — of their unrelenting support, love, and care — has left Lucero with an acute, unfilled void that leaves her uncertain about when she will feel full again. For her and her family, thoughts of Long Island, where her grandparents once lived, evoke anguish and exacerbate feelings of emptiness. “I remember when they announced that my grandmother passed away, my dad was like, ‘I know what it feels like because I lost my mother a few years ago too,’ so it was definitely a trigger. He was always ready to go to Long Island to visit my grandparents, so it was definitely hard for him as well, and I remember he said, ‘Who are we going to visit now?’ Even now, there are some moments when I don’t even realize and I’m like, ‘we should go this weekend to visit them in Long Island, but… we can’t do that anymore.’”
Through this period of bereavement, Lucero said, she encounters fluctuating frustrations, mood swings, and blockages. “Sometimes, I just feel like giving up, but then you gotta keep going. I don’t know if I understand grief 100 percent yet, but there’s always gonna be emptiness in your heart, there’s always gonna be something hard that you’re not gonna be able to share, and I don’t think there should be a time limit on grief.”
In an earlier encounter with grief and loss, following the death of her father’s mother, Lucero says she experienced depression, as a result of detaching herself from loved ones. This time around, however, she no longer emotionally isolates herself. Despite her frustrations and lack of motivation, she no longer wishes to endure the loss alone, rather choosing to live by the indelible impact left by her grandparents.
For Lucero, her grief is expressed through writing about memories of her grandparents and engaging with her family and friends. “I opened myself up to something my grandfather said… He didn’t want us to, you know, fall apart or to cry. My grandparents had a happy attitude, and I try to be that person, I try to lift others up like they did and not let myself bring myself down.”
Towering Above
Noor Lima Boudakian, 20:
During the last 20 minutes of her online debate class last fall, Noor Lima Boudakian received a text from a friend that read, in Armenian: “Alen heroically gave his life today”. Boudakian was alone in her mother’s office, waiting for her class to end, when she turned her camera off and began sobbing.
Boudakian, 20, remembers a photograph of her second-grade class in Armenia, one of her and her classmates sitting on a set of steps in a park, with her friend Alen Khachatryan towering a foot above everyone else. Memories of Khachatryan, who died at 19, trigger paroxysms of crying. “I’ll just be doing something else, I’ll just be sitting there and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, he was so tall,’ and then I just start crying,” she said, “He was really kind and mild… just the concept of someone I went to school with and I was friends with, stuff like that, I get stressed out and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, he’s not coming back.’”
Having lived in Armenia from the age of five to nine, and returning each year, the most recent iteration of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan between September and December 2020 brought about copious loss for Boudakian. “Historic land with Armenian religious and secular monuments was lost and two of my friends that I went to elementary school with, people I had been hanging out with ten months before, were killed in that war doing their mandatory military service,” she said.
In the earliest days following the loss, she experienced a sense of sharp sorrow, but the physical distance between Boudakian in the U.S. and her loved ones in Armenia incited feelings of alienation and guilt. “I felt disconnected because it’s people that I really care deeply about, but not people I speak to on an everyday basis and they’re across the world from me. And so I felt the cultural shock of it and the personal shock of it, but it also felt like if I just didn’t look at my phone and didn’t think about it, I could pretend it wasn’t happening. I also felt weird,” she said, as people she knew “were experiencing this huge thing and I’m just here in America, I’m just going to college, and so I think it felt almost like a cultural shock of reminding me that I’m not that much there anymore.”
Given the physical distance and temporary distractions of college and work, Boudakian struggles with allowing herself to lean into her grief. “I try to not feel like I’m overreacting and pushing it onto people to think about it. I sometimes feel like I’m not allowed to be mad about this,” she said, often fluctuating between feelings of anger and sadness at the fact “that people can just pretend [the conflict] is not happening when it is happening.”
Grief, she said, “is an ongoing process of coming to terms with whatever that event is that happened to you and the psychological changes that happen from it… it doesn’t go away. As time goes on, I’m going to think about it less, but there’s still going to be days where I remember it.” Grief incites a physical heaviness for Boudakian, prompting her to question and reckon with her sense of identity, in order to “justify being here and not being in Armenia with my family.”
The losses endured have shifted her engagement with schoolwork, increasing her awareness and empathy for the issues she regularly learns about in college as a global studies and economics major. “Throwing myself into my schoolwork and my work has been a big part of me coping with it,” she said. Yet this temporary alleviation of her grief has also been a form of “alienation, a big part of me coping with it, and then sometimes it hits me like a truck and I don’t function for a day, and I just sit there and cry.”
Debate, in particular, “became a really interesting processing space and a way to educate other people, because they had to do research about it to argue with me, which was amazing. It just reminded me that behind every policy I learned about, everything I learned about, there’s people everywhere whose everyday lives are being impacted by that.”
Though the deaths mentioned are not all COVID-related, each vignette explores the ways in which loved ones respond to the physical and psychological loss of a person or significant interpersonal relationship amidst a period of uncertainty. In interviewing the bereaved and illuminating this grief, it became clear that in this year of ongoingness, though grief may go unseen, its presence — intense and insidious, palpable and profound — is a form of love persevering.