Everyone remembers the moment they discovered that COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic; the moment their life changed forever. After I discovered that my competitive dance and high school careers would end prematurely, I cried an embarrassing amount of tears and became genuinely mad at life itself. After four years of working tirelessly, my vision of the perfect ending and appreciation that my grade no doubt deserved crumbled before my eyes. Sure, I may just be ranting about a first-world problem and acting dramatic. The truth is though, we all undervalue the tolls the pandemic has placed on our lives, and specifically on our mental health. It’s time we start talking about it.
It was only during my very last Zoom dance class when I realized that what we were all going through can actually be classified as grief. “Grief is about losing something important to you unexpectedly and devastatingly, which takes a toll on your happiness,” my dance teacher said. “You have all lost your teenagehood, your freedom, and for our graduating students, the end to your childhood. You need to take time to grieve these losses.”
The 5 Stages of Grief, originally developed by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, is a model outlining how grief can be divided into five different chronological phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. This model has been met with worldwide recognition and can be applied to the COVID-19 pandemic. Don’t believe me? Here are the popular 5 Stages of Grief, according to COVID-19.
- Denial
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Picture this: I’m in Florida at my grandmother’s pool on March Break, watching a bunch of COVID-susceptible elders pretend there isn’t a killer virus on the loose. Not to mention, I sat there believing I’d be back at school again despite how unprecedented the virus was. In hindsight, I probably should have been more focused on rushing home before Canada closed its borders. “It’ll just be a two-week extended March Break,” I remember all my friends (and even my school principal) saying, as we went on to plan our prom and graduation festivities. Little did we know, the effects of the virus would last longer than just a couple of weeks.
- Anger
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The common thing to do during this stage is scream, “WHYYYY?!?” to the world while considering banging your head against the wall in frustration — and the pandemic is no exception to this rule. Sure, we’ve all accommodated to the situation, but I can remember countless conversations with friends and family where we ranted for hours on end about how mad we were that the pandemic had the nerve to inconvenience us this badly. Was it irrational? Perhaps. But maybe a bit of overreaction helped us overcome this stage.
- Bargaining
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Begging the universe is not something I do often, but believe me when I tell you I was not the only one trying to bargain to have life maintain its normalcy. “Please don’t close university residences down,” I’d plead. “I’ll wear my mask, I’ll follow government guidelines, and I promise I won’t go to any parties. Just please, don’t take away my dorm.” It may seem a bit odd considering I never believed anyone was listening to me beg embarrassingly, but bargaining is just another step on the road to recovery from such a disaster.
- Depression
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The second-last step is likely the most difficult to overcome. After you’ve tried denying the problem and are forced to face the truth, the anger you evoked wasn’t satisfying, and your bargains failed to work, the last resort is to give up and just be sad. I feel lucky to have essentially skipped over this stage myself (if my residence closes down, that’ll be a different story), but many of my friends whose universities have outbreaks are facing this stage head-on. “There are days when I just don’t feel like trying or doing anything besides lying in bed because I lack the motivation and general happiness to do so,” a first-year student from a locked-down Ontario university said. Why are we so upset? It’s simple — an important component of the university experience is socialization, and when we face a heavy workload in addition to decreased social contact, it seriously impacts our happiness, making us, yeah, a little depressed. Seeing friends from a distance just doesn’t cut it; we never knew it would be so hard just to get a hug.
- Acceptance
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If you’ve made it to this stage, congrats: you’re officially at peace with this whole mess, and that’s a hard thing to achieve. It is in this stage when you realize that the best thing to do is to adjust to the roadblocks life throws at you and live one day at a time. If you don’t think you’ll be able to reach the acceptance stage, do not worry; I didn’t think I would, either. But it was only when I pulled myself out of bed and started to appreciate the things I do have, such as my friends, my university, and my family, when I started to feel a bit better. Yes, COVID times are difficult — there’s no doubt about that — but the best way to overcome the rollercoaster of grief is to start being a bit more positive.