Getting to “After”

The Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

“There is something noble in the love of the dead.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have been thinking for the past few days now about Molly Osberg’s recent piece in Jezebel, “There Is No After.” In it, Osberg describes the incalculable toll of the past year, both in terms of human lives lost and in emotional and psychic trauma for those of us who remain: “Now, staring down the oft-invoked ‘return to normalcy,’ I don’t know how to metabolize such a towering sense of collective grief, and one that’s infused practically everything I’ve ever known.”

Osberg describes the surfeit of advice for that return to normalcy, on how we can transition back to our former, normal lives, advice that ranges from the well-meaning to outright denialism. “In the place of a shared sense of reality or collective expression of mourning,” she writes, “I see a torrent of advice on how a person who managed to survive can feel more self-actualized once they return to the shuffle between the office and after-work drinks. To me, this looks like denial, the first tentative step towards what I’m told are seven distinct stages of grief.”

I share Osberg’s frustration with this move, and I share the sense of dismay that we’re going to come out of this moment with no real accounting for what actually happened. It feels overwhelming, how fast we’re moving, even as I find myself…