Oregon, United States
Grief is universal to the human experience. It’s not a fun part of the experience – which is why we’ll go to great lengths to avoid it. Few people actually know how to grieve well…
We’ve known for some time that Third Culture Kids and those in more mobile or transient environments and situations tend to suffer from more grief, more frequently, and with less recovery time. Moving causes loss of familiar places, people, and experiences, as well as social standing and the comfort of being known… and these griefs can be experienced both by a person leaving, and by people being left.
In the wake of the current pandemic, people across the globe are experiencing more grief because of more losses. Many have lost familiar places and the ability to interact with familiar people because of quarantine measures. We’ve all lost a degree of certainty we thought we had before the outbreak. Many have lost livelihoods and familiar ways of life.
We’ve all lost things… and loss causes grief – and (this is important): grief is going to be expressed.
It’s going to come out, whether we like it or not. We can decide to give our grief attention and try to direct it’s flow – or it’s going to chart it’s own course out… but it’s going to come out.
Many behavioral problems experienced by students in international schools can actually find their roots in unresolved grief. A loss of control not properly grieved can easily lead to overly controlling behavior in other areas of life. Focusing energy on containing unresolved grief steels from resources that could be used for academic, social, and emotional growth.
We all need to grieve better, now more than ever, as we deal with the losses added to life by our current pandemic situation.
One of the best coping strategies I’d ever heard of was from a family who moved frequently and decided to make baking part of their grieving process.
Whenever this family would move, the first thing they would set up in their new home was the kitchen. On the first available weekend, they would spend all day together baking cakes, pies, tarts, cookies, brownies, muffins… all the tasty treats they could. While baking, they would share with each other the things they were sad to say goodbye to, talk of the friends they were missing, and share the fears and unknowns they were facing. Then, at the end of the day… they’d eat their sadness – or at least the baked representations of all they’d shared.
It’s a genius plan for several reasons. For one thing, it gets an intangible emotion (grief, sadness, or anxiousness) out in the open though a means we can experience with our senses (seeing and feeling ingredients, smelling the baking, tasting the treats). That’s a great way to feel resolution: experiencing externally something connecting to a feeling internally.
Baking was also a great way to talk more comfortably about less than comfortable emotions. We seem to work best in the second order when it comes to these things. If the family just sat down and made sharing their pain the priority, it would have likely been more awkward than focusing on baking and letting the conversation be the secondary activity.
We all experience grief, and we could all probably do better at dealing with it on terms we have some control over rather than letting it come out in bursts we don’t plan for (but will inevitably happen… grief is ALWAYS going to be expressed).
COVID-19 has caused unforeseen losses for all of us, and the harsh reality is that we will likely rack up new losses even as we transition out of quarantine – we’ve started habits now that may (whether we liked them or not) actually be missed: we’re getting more family time, time to reflect, time we can wear sweatpants, etc.
I say we be proactive and bake some sadness…
