Isolation of grief in epidemics

Many adopted a pet during the COVID-19 epidemic. My wife and I have lost just one.

Gowda, our eight-and-a-half-year-old exotic shorthaired cat, died on 16 April. After spending another night vomiting, we took him to the hospital the previous morning. Doctors were not sure what was wrong, but, over the course of 24 hours, the signs pointed to fatal kidney disease. We made difficult choices to euthanize him.

The events would have been terrible under any circumstances. But I found that the forced isolation of the epidemic grieved a lost family member, which was probably more challenging than I was.

My wife and I spent most of the 24 hours inside a zipcar parked outside the animal hospital. Due to safety regulations, we could not wait in the lobby, so we – and all the other families worried about their pets – waited alone in our cars. Despite being feet away from each other, we were all isolated from the world, trapped in a pod of gloom made of metal and glass. Once, we saw a woman hand her cat to the veterinarian staff, get back into her car, and sabotage.

We spent hours staring blankly at the long hedges in front of our car. My wife’s iPhone was the lifeline and curse. With each passing second, we fully hoped for a call, but each time the phone finally rang, the news was worse.

As we tried to sleep in the zipcar overnight, the phone was mounted on the dashboard. I would stare at it in the midst of a fit of sleep, when it would ring. We can never talk to a person, which means that we cannot see body language, facial expressions, eye contact – nonverbal cues that help us make the most difficult decisions of our lives.

When we went to see Gowda for our final goodbye, we sat in a dimly lit room on a soft couch. Our masks were constantly filled with snot. From the other side of the room, the staff told that we could not be with Gouda when we died. There will be no easy way to be six feet apart.

The only time when we were close to another human being was when he handed over Gowda to us, wrapped in a blanket, a cone in his neck and intoxicated from his mind. As soon as we were alone with her, we burst off our masks so we could kiss her one last time.

We received the last phone call from the hospital on the ride home. Gowda died peacefully.

Just after this, me and my wife realized that we did not want to go home, but we had nowhere else to go. We have not been vaccinated by COVID-19 yet, so we cannot see our family or friends to find solitude. We cannot escape from our empty studio apartment.

Out of habit, we opened the front door with ginger. Every day for more than eight and a half years, Gowda had always greeted us, sometimes throwing his entire body against the door in his excitement to see us. But he was not there.

Instead, we saw her food bowls, her scratched posts, her toys. Our apartment was a place we felt truly safe during the epidemic, but it now reminds us of our missing family member.

So we started cleaning.

Usually, getting rid of things becomes easy for my wife and me. We have used much of what Mary Kando has written about it. Life changing magic. But it was different. It was more difficult than anything we had done before. Since The things we got rid of were reminiscent of our missing family member. If we had kept them, we would not have been able to move forward completely, but it was not easy to let them go. And because of the epidemic, we could not ask others to help and help. We faced this part of grief like the two of us.

I will never know how different the grief of this death would have been if we had still not been in an epidemic. I think it made the worst moments worse. It trapped us in our car. It kept us in the hospital. It separated us from our families. It locked us in our house with memories of a lost family member.

And yet, the epidemic forces us to face our grief. Me and my wife are slowly recovering. We spend the day crying and remembering. We say a good thing about Gouda before bed. Because we are insecure with each other, I do not feel like I am taking away any feelings, so my mind is not racing, and I can go to sleep.

Kondo recommends thanking the items you take away from your home and acknowledging the role they played in your life. I did that for everything of Gowda. “Thanks, scratching the post,” I said. “Thank you, Plastic Easter Eggs.” Thank you, Food Placemate. “I also thanked his garbage can.

It may seem trivial to thank Gowda’s things. But it was one of the few rituals left to me during the epidemic, when so much was taken away, and it helped me recognize everything that Gouda had given me. They gave me the responsibility to care and take care of them every day. He taught me how to play, bending out of sight around the bed so that it could flow towards me. He taught me about love, snatching it off the top of my head on my pillow at midnight.

Thank you, Gowda.