When I Meet You in Person, Will I Still Click My Mouse?
In memory of Spottswoode, the office greeter. He was amazing with patients and incredibly sweet and kind. Photos/Juliet Ruiz.
By Juliet Ruiz
My old office was located smack-dab in the middle of Las Vegas. Spacious and well laid out, it faced a courtyard of gazebos and twisted pine trees. The floor-to-ceiling windows were edged with burgundy drapes, and the walls were covered in artwork and diplomas. Throw pillows dotted amber couches of my little sanctuary of hope, but there were no plants. A patient once asked why, and I told her the truth; I would probably kill them. I am a Thanatologist after all. We laughed. She was, and hopefully still is, a good-natured lady who encountered unspeakable grief. She, like many who passed through my doors, was muddling through as best she could.
The next time she came in, she held out a small clear vase of water with a green sprig barely touching the vase’s lip. “Here,” she said. “You can’t kill this one. All it needs is light and water.”
Twisting roots soon filled the vase and leaves grew towards the light of the window. Someone even asked when I was going to plant that thing in the ground, but I liked seeing its roots. I work in death, and I did not want to bury them, not even in a pot of soil.
Over the years, the courtyard filled with people at night leaving beer cans, needles, and feces. Robberies went up and 911 was called more and more for psychotic meth-heads, threatening vagrants, and men passed out drunk in the parking lot. My sanctuary, our sanctuary, no longer felt safe, and our lease was due to expire. We moved and the plant moved with us.
Then came 2020. As the new year rolled in, so did the microbial hand grenades of COVID-19. I had endured this before growing up on our quiet street in Greenwich Village. Back then, it was AIDS. Friends and neighbors who sat at our dinner table or gave us hugs as we passed in the street were suddenly dead. Our little street lost its echoes of laughter and the hugging stopped. People had theories, but we did not yet know exactly what HIV/AIDS was, nor how it spread.
Now I live in Las Vegas. On March 17, our governor went live to shut down gaming at midnight. The look on his face, the tone of his voice, told me he knew more than he was saying, something that caused him to commit political suicide, right there, live on Facebook.
I called my team, all two of them. We are Medicare providers, and many people I work with are vulnerable. We were not sure we could keep them or ourselves safe. People had theories, but we did not yet know exactly what COVID-19 was, nor how it spread. We made the decision to close our doors and go virtual.
This article started as a piece on Disenfranchised (Hidden) Grief in the Age of COVID. But as I pondered hidden grief, I discovered my own.
The internet is loaded with advice on COVID-19 and hidden grief as vague as it is abundant. I will address some of the ambiguity here about hidden grief.
We all know what COVID-19 is, but the term disenfranchised grief, or hidden grief, might not be familiar. Disenfranchisement in grieving happens when our grief is not socially recognized and resources for the bereft are either limited or non-existent. It can develop from manner or circumstances of death, non-socially sanctioned or expected level of attachment, or lack of social acceptance to grieve what is lost. It’s grief in the margins, grief on the fringe.
Our feelings are organic and need to flow along the rivers of our experience. When we compare our grief to this global trauma, we literally damn our grief and, in this damning, our grief will swell and spread and spill into other aspects of our lives. One common example of this is depression. Another might be manifested in our behaviors.
First, please, stop judging yourself. Grief is grief and one cannot be compared to another’s. We grieve those to whom we are attached or who represent something meaningful to us. As creatures of meaning, when that connection is broken, our perception of the universe is shattered.
We tend to rank our grief, to compare it to the grief of others, and place it in a socially constructed context. One might question the validity of one’s own experience when bombarded by reports of the millions sick, dead, and dying around the world and ask; do I even have the right to grieve?
In the face of COVID-19, our hidden losses take on an intensified aspect of perceived triviality when viewed from this global lens. Hidden losses in the Age of COVID are increased because of it. No funeral, no condolences, no support. Today, we count the dead on our screens and hear of the sick and dying on social media.
When I visited my brother in late February, he said “Yeah, you know what else kills a lot of people? It’s called the FLU!” He laughed. I didn’t argue with him. He often wanted to fight with me, so I learned to let it go, smile, and nod. I’m glad I did. He died on March 3, 2020.
Facebook blew up. His Wikipedia page was updated within an hour. He was famous. People around the world were paying their respects and asking if there was going to be a service. My now widowed sister-in-law planned a memorial that could include his fans, but LA went into lock down and those plans changed. To this day, people still post on his wall that they miss him.
If I tell you he died of COVID-19, you may feel a certain way. If I tell you he died of cancer, you may feel something different, that his death didn’t have the right optics or was off-trend. He loved music, and as he was dying, I stood by his bed and played one of his favorite pieces from my phone, 1/1 by Brian Eno. I was lucky. I got to say good-bye. One of the impacts of hidden grief in the age of COVID-19 is a killer called guilt.
Hidden grief is shrouded in social isolation. Our loved ones are dying among strangers. We feel guilty because they died alone, or worse; your loved one caught COVID-19 from you. I gave a lecture at an HIV Wellness conference about ten years ago titled HIV and the Transformation of Self. One of the transformations is that, for the one infected, the act of love can also be murder. COVID-19 is much easier to catch and to give. We don’t hear those stories, so deeply hidden is this grief. Like dirt thudding onto a coffin, that hidden grief is buried deeper.
I have adjusted now to friends, family, and patients as pixels on the monitor. We are both fans of each other and celebrities on the screen. The famous became friends as they share their experiences on YouTube or put themselves out for hire on platforms like Cameo. You can now hire Snoop Dog to toke on a joint and say “Hello Joe” for $700. Performers moved from distant stages to our desktop and often discuss their personal experiences through word or through a song strummed out from their living room to ours. In this, they became just like us, just like you, just like me.
Each week, I look into dozens and dozens of living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. I find myself noticing plants or the lack of them. My world has been reduced to the walls of my house. The dear husband does all the shopping and errands. He’s a cross between a Polynesian and a Red Neck. He needs to go outside. I call him the Plague Runner.
But what about my plant that wouldn’t die? I know it’s just a plant, but it represented an era of people journeying out of darkness towards the light of hope.
Do I grieve this plant? No. Well, maybe. I am sad when I think of it and the life I had before COVID-19 and how the world has changed. There is less traffic now on the rare occasions I drive somewhere. Is this really Decatur? Where are all the cars? Then I wonder if the decrease in traffic is caused by COVID-19 deaths in my city.
When we open our doors, when I can see patients in person, I expect to find the plant dead. The nice lady who gave it to me was discharged long ago. Now, over half my practice I have never met in person. We will sit in my room, my sanctuary of hope, and face each other. It will be weird sizing each other up and how different or similar we look from our pixelated torsos. Clicking my mouse to write my note as we talk has become habitual, and I wonder if my hand will seek to find it in the air above my thigh. We will adjust. I will replace the plant, a new symbol of hope potted in soil. The dead plant will be buried beneath it and, who knows, a flower might grow there someday.
Juliet Ruiz is a clinically practicing Thanatologist who runs a small private practice. A native New Yorker with a background in Death Studies and a masters in Anthropology and Social Work, Ms. Ruiz has two previous non-fiction publications under the name Juliet Reubens; The Las Vegas Phenomenon housed in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Special Collections, and an essay about family and human relationships that won $10,000 and a fully sponsored trip to Korea. Her fiction appears under J. Alex Ruiz to separate her clinical practice from her works of speculative historical fantasy set in Ancient Egypt.
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