Is it irrational? Or is it just grief?

Did you know that for every 1 death from Covid, it’s estimated that there are around 9 direct mourners? This estimate does not include friends, coworkers, neighbors or even extended family. This means that, as of December 31, 2021, there have been 5,433, 469 deaths worldwide from Covid, and ~50,000,000 people who are directly mourning those deaths.

Dr. Ashton Verdery and his Bereavement Multiplier

This relationship comes from the work of Dr. Ashton Verdery and the Bereavement Multiplier he and his team developed. His work was based on the United States specifically, and I adapted that to a worldwide estimate above.

Big Deaths vs. Shadowlosses

The Bereavement Multiplier takes into account Big Deaths (deaths of people) but not Shadowlosses (the death of something, not someone). How many Shadowlosses is the world grieving right now? Marriages, friendships, dreams, jobs, goals, wishes, careers. How many of you reading this right now have lost something like this to the pandemic?

Frustrated, Angry, Short-Tempered, Bitchy & Cranky

You might have noticed that more and more people are struggling to be as kind, patient and compassionate as they were before the pandemic. I see it on social media, in comment sections, and at the grocery store all the time. Everyone is either at the end of their rope, or almost at the end of their rope.

If you think about the last time you were grieving, do you remember an instance when you might have gotten snappy with someone? Or maybe you were a little harsh in the way you responded? Or perhaps, you were very quick to anger over something relatively small.

Grief is stress, and when our brains are stressed, we have less to work with. It’s hard to carry an extra dash of patience and compassion throughout each day when we’re already carrying bags and bags of unrelenting stress.

This pandemic is a grief pandemic as much as it is a stress pandemic

When I catch myself being, well, not my best, I remind myself that I’m grieving. So much has been lost to this pandemic, Big Deaths and Shadowlosses. Even if I don’t feel like I’m grieving right this very second, I probably am. I just can’t find it with precision because I’m so dang stressed about everything else going on! Who has time to grieve when you are just trying to survive, right?

And that might be you, too. You might not be able to see your grief through all the stress.

Are they irrational? Or just grieving?

If you are struggling to find compassion, patience and care for others, it can be helpful to remind yourself that these people you are dealing with—these irrational people—they might be grieving. It might just be grief.

And this goes for you too. Someone might have called you crazy, or irrational, recently.

But you might just be grieving.

It’s hard to see that sometimes, amidst the stress of an almost 2-year long global pandemic.

So, I ask you, is it irrational? Or is it just grief?

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Resources:

• About Dr. Verdery: Dr. Ashton M. Verdery from the Department of Sociology and Criminology at PennState: About Dr. Verdery

• Read Dr. Verdery’s paper on the Bereavement Multiplier: Tracking the reach of COVID-19 kin loss with a bereavement multiplier applied to the United States | Ashton M. Verdery, Emily Smith-Greenaway, Rachel Margolis, Jonathan Drew | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | July 28, 2020

• Where my COVID-19 statistics regarding deaths and total cases come from: COVID Tracker by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering

Special thanks to Dr. Verdery for reviewing these slides and providing feedback!