There is an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the one where Denny dies and Izzie is distraught. She ends up on the bathroom floor unable to move. She won’t take off her dress and she feels that her sadness won’t let her move. Everyone tried everything to get her out of the bathroom floor and nothing. Cristina comes over and gets on the floor with her and talks about Shiva and how it honours the dead. 

Shiva, a Hebrew word that literally means “seven”. This is the week-long mourning period in Judaism for relatives. I learned about shiva from a friend a long time ago, from what I remember/understand about “sitting shiva”: it’s a time to honour the dead by spending a week with family. People bring food and they talk to you about your loss and you get to embrace it and get comfort from them. I remember thinking how beautiful, to have this moment where you just feel everything and people are there to bring you comfort. All you have to do is try and deal with your grief, nothing else. I know there are a number of rules around shiva and I can’t remember them all but I have been thinking about the need for shiva since the beginning of the pandemic.

A year ago my uncle died, we were in level 5 lockdown, I couldn’t go be with my father as he tried to come to grips with the loss of his older brother. My father couldn’t be at the funeral as it was in another country. I couldn’t deal with my grief, somehow it too felt locked in the lockdown. I worried about my father and I worried that I couldn’t sit shiva with him. Here we are again, in another lockdown and my aunt has passed, my father now the last of his father’s children. Again, the funeral will be in another country and he is unable to go. Yet again, we are unable to sit and mourn truly as a family.  No one is sitting shiva with us, we can’t even sit shiva as a family.

This is the true tragedy of this pandemic, the separation of our heartaches. We are so isolated and our losses are so many but no one can come and sit shiva with us. We are lying on our bathroom floors drowning in our tears and no one is helping us up. We are having to learn to sit shiva by ourselves. We are dealing with our grief in isolation and talking ourselves through pain into comfort. A friend of mine died in a hospital room utterly alone, his family could not come in and say goodbye. Can you imagine that kind of aloneness and the loneliness it begets? 

In living our lives through the confines of the pandemic we keep wondering about our burdens. We feel everyone is going through so much and carrying their own burdens that we find it difficult to express our own. How do you ask someone to come and sit shiva with you when you feel that they are hoping someone will come and sit shiva with them? We are beginning to forge armour. Building our emotional battle weaponry by creating ourselves anew – strength is forged in fire I guess. We are building strength for ourselves because we need to be okay sitting shiva by ourselves. We want to become impervious but maybe strength needs to mean something else now. Now more than ever we need to sit shiva with our loved ones, the people we care about. Many times in a day, I catch myself about to cry and I send the tears back in and I keep saying to myself this is not normal. It is not normal but it is what I have right now.

Perhaps a true show of strength would be to call that person who you want to sit shiva with you and ask them. Even though you worry they might now be able to because of their own burdens or unsure if they want or can be there for you. Maybe we need to sit shiva for each other helping alleviate both burdens at the same time. Maybe it’s not about asking someone to sit shiva with you but more sitting together, saying I got you. I got you, the three most comforting words in the English language. I got you.