Grieving what was never held

Chronic illness + COVID, erasure, and a ritual for silenced grief

For me, the pandemic cracked open wounds already under strain—medical dismissal, chronic illness, experience erasure, and the absence of support.

I gave birth to my son two weeks into lockdown, after experiencing a late-term pregnancy loss 18 months before. Thinking back to the terror of those days still elicits a visceral response—stack that with the invalidation from the very people we should have leaned on, exhaustion, being under-resourced, and then the residual comments like, “Oh, how wonderful you got/get to be home and snuggle with your baby!”

But there was no ease, rest, or “gift of time.” The first giggles and snuggles were underlaid with the fear of illness and death. My family of origin was mostly absent as we’d experienced shifts during our loss that led to ruptures on both sides. My husband had a generous paternity package, but was “strongly encouraged” to only take two weeks because layoffs were imminent.

While I found precious moments to relish in my son’s soft breathing and how he’d sigh when he’d smell me nearby, I resent how easily people have rewritten the story of that time.

It is not narrative alchemy or mythmaking when we collectively erase the truth.

Reading We Must Stop and Grieve COVID moved me to tears. This piece names a painful collective inability/refusal to reckon, grieve, and repair:

I have to believe it is because we were never able to stop and grieve what we lost. We were rushed to forget what we survived, what we are actively surviving, mostly through the power of our hands. And until we stop to grieve, we will be forced to exist - certainly not to be confused with living - in a world that we no longer fit within, whether we come to terms with that or not.

—Excerpt from We Must Stop and Grieve COVID

This is a beautiful invitation to grieve. To tend to the memory that the pandemic illuminated human expendability, especially for People of the Global Majority. Without grief and memory, we miss the doorways to reflect, shed, integrate, and change. And in doing so, we perpetuate harm.

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When I was 15 in the late 90s, I got really, really sick with what would later be diagnosed as Lyme disease + coinfections, only getting a correct diagnosis at age 29. For years, I lived in a body that crashed under the weight of ordinary colds, experienced migratory joint and fascial pain, carried a fatigue I could barely name, and showed bloodwork indicative of infection—but was told repeatedly, “we don’t know what’s wrong”, or later, “it’s in your head.” For 15 years, every practitioner would eventually pathologize me, blame me, or shelve me as a medical mystery. Once, after searing jaw pain (now understood as a Lyme symptom), a specialist handed me a prescription pad and wrote: RELAX. I drove home and sobbed. (FWIW, narcissistic doctors with a savior complex were the most punishing: when they couldn’t solve the “problem,” then they concluded I must be the problem.)

I learned to mask, push through collapse, and normalize cycles of breakdown. Friends and family were confused about how sick I was and wanted quick fixes and answers (me too!), and became tired of it all when there were no answers (me too!).

The denial I encountered was more than just medical—it was cultural. In one corporate job, a man my age would stroll in sick every other month, cough through the open office, and I would inevitably catch whatever he had and be sidelined for weeks. And my colleagues said, “Wow, you get sick a lot.”

What I lived was not just illness. It was ableism and toxic positivity. A cultural incapacity for grief, discomfort, and the unknown. The privilege of the “well” to pass through the world unchecked, while the vulnerable bear the cost.

After COVID, I see the same refusal played on a mass scale—an insistence that we skip grief, silence trauma, and return to “business as usual.” But why are we returning to something that wasn’t working for us?

Now, navigating motherhood without a village, the pattern continues. One morning, I sat before my PCP—tear-streaked, exhausted, lamenting the exertion and loneliness that is American motherhood. She reached for her prescription pad to prescribe antidepressants. I looked up and said, “I think my reactions and feelings are appropriate for what I’m experiencing.” She agreed (she’s a mom, too). But now what? Let’s start here:

Stop pathologizing me. I am not the problem—the system is. I have found some respite in this reframe: my body/illness is not a problem to be fixed, cured, healed, or solved. I am replacing that logic with a somatic-centered approach: my body is communicating, I am listening, and we are dancing.

This isn’t just personal decline—it’s structural expectation. Women in America are the fallback net. The ones who absorb every breakdown of social, medical, and political systems. COVID taxed women, especially marginalized women, to the extreme.

Sociologist Jessica Calarco captures this precisely in How Women Became America’s Safety Net: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” Her work demonstrates how, in the U.S., the burden of managing risk, caregiving, crisis, and collapse is disproportionately offloaded onto women, reinforced by a culture of individualism and moral responsibility.

Stop pathologizing us. We are not the problem—the system is. Give me an Rx that says “move to a family-first country with socialized child and medical care and weapon restrictions,” please. Better, write an Rx to send Empire to another planet, per Jane Goodall’s wish:

We have not merely skipped grief—we have silenced trauma, denied chronic illness, and steered stories into a neat, marketable version of “resilience” (yeah, moms are so tough!). In doing so, we accept a carewashed, traumawashed, and sciencewashed version of the past/present—devoid of accountability and structural change.

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Carewashing (I made it up, but here’s a tidy definition if you need one) is the act of disguising or excusing harm under the appearance of “care,” compassion, or healing. It happens when systems, institutions, or individuals present themselves as nurturing and protective while actually silencing, dismissing, or pathologizing the people they claim to serve. Examples include:

• A doctor prescribing antidepressants to a new mother without addressing her lack of support or resources, effectively framing systemic neglect as a personal defect.

• Employers offering “wellness perks” like yoga classes while maintaining abusive workloads and discouraging use of paternity leave.

• Public officials praising “essential workers” while denying them paid protection, healthcare, or safe conditions.

Where greenwashing hides environmental harm behind eco-friendly branding, carewashing hides structural neglect or abuse behind a surface of empathy and kindness. It erases grief, trauma, and lived truth by insisting that harm is “care.”

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Another conversation I draw from is Attachment Theory Is White Supremacy (in a Lab Coat). That profound essay (that I am still absorbing with each reread) asserts that many psychological frameworks, under the guise of objectivity, replicate colonial norms, police intimacy, compel conformity, and erase alternative relational worlds.

It reminds me that when we are pathologized for needing to grieve, rage, request care, etc., it is not a personal failure but a reflection of replicated power.¹

In my own modest attempt at narrative alchemy and existential meaning-making², I wonder if this is all about creating transitions and transitional cultures. Where thresholding is the skill of standing at the edge of worlds, holding the tension between what is ending and what is not yet formed.

Liminal space has always been a place of silencing.

Those who point out the cracks, grief, sickness, inequity, and so on, are told to quiet down/SFU, brutalized, and worse, so the dominant narrative can march forward unchanged. But threshold work requires us to stay, witness, grieve, speak into that silence, and act.

Those of us at the edges, carrying grief and memory, are keepers of what might otherwise be erased. Thresholders also have a great capacity to adapt as circumstances change, and even to create a Third Way culture.

But let’s consider Third Way culture another day. Today, we deserve better than erasure. I appreciate writing and spaces that insist the truth be spoken—thanks, Trey of Grief & Grits. We deserve collective grief. Naming what was lost—bodies, safety, trust, capacity to be heard—matters deeply. Even if repair never comes, remembering together may become a kind of care.

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Invitation to grieve

If you’ve read this far, you may feel grief rising in your own body—the losses unacknowledged, the dismissals you’ve endured, the places where your story was silenced. This ritual is an offering of witness and repair. It is a way to honor what was erased and to remember that you are not the problem. The system is. This spell invites you to grieve, release pathologizing, and remember together as an act of care.

If possible, embark on this ritual with trusted friends, family, familiars, and/or the plant kingdom.

Grief is nebulous and nonlinear. It defies pattern recognition, pounces unawares, or creeps slowly in. If the ritual below falls short for you or feels like just another thing to do, that’s okay. Listen and be kind to yourself. Or scream. You choose.

Ritual for silenced grief

Let’s name what has been silenced, release pathologizing judgments, and weave grief into collective care. Make the words below your own. Gather:

• A bowl of water

• A candle

• Three small slips of paper and a pen

• A handful of salt or herbs that feel cleansing to you

• A safe place to burn or bury paper afterward

Steps:

1. Prepare your space. Light your candle. Place the bowl of water in front of you. Breathe deeply, naming aloud the truth that your body is not the problem—the system is.

2. Write the erasures. On the first slip, write something you’ve been told that pathologizes or denies your experience (for example: “You get sick a lot” or “RELAX”). If you’re practicing with others, how can you hold or witness the erasures others have experienced, especially if they are not your personal experiences? Place your slip under the bowl of water. Say:

   I refuse the story that I am the problem. I return this to the silence/system it came from.

3. Name what was lost.

   On the second slip, write what you grieve most from the last years—whether safety, trust, a sense of being held, or specific losses. Hold it to your heart, then sprinkle salt or herbs over it. Say:

   I grieve what was taken, silenced, or erased. This grief belongs, and I belong with it.

4. Claim what endures. On the third slip, write what you choose to carry forward: compassion, memory, resistance, solidarity. Hold it over the flame and say:

   In the absence of repair, rememberance is [fill in what feels best for you].

5. Release. Burn or bury the first two slips (the erasure and the grief). Place the third slip somewhere you will see it again—on an altar, tucked in a book, or by your kitchen sink.

6. Close. Dip your fingers into the water and touch them to your forehead, heart, and belly. Blow out the candle.

1. Replicated power is power built into frameworks, institutions, and narratives that repeat and reinforce the same hierarchies—colonial, patriarchal, and ableist—that already exist, even when systems claim to be objective (such as medicine, psychology, or “care”). So, the harm experienced (being pathologized, dismissed, silenced) isn’t random or personal: it is a repetition of structural power dynamics.

2. Existential meaning-making is what we do when: a) we survive something hard and ask What does this mean for who I am now?; b) we reinterpret loss, illness, or trauma as part of a larger journey rather than random pain; c) we search for new forms of belonging, identity, or purpose when old frameworks collapse.