There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. Understanding the stages of grief is a start. What can individuals do to manage all this grief? We are grieving on a micro and a macro level. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. You said we’re feeling more than one kind of grief? We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air. The loss of normalcy the fear of economic toll the loss of connection. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. We feel the world has changed, and it has. Kessler: Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. Is it right to call some of what they’re feeling grief? HBR: People are feeling any number of things right now. The conversation is lightly edited for clarity. Kessler shared his thoughts on why it’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how he believes we will find meaning in it. He is the founder of which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries. His volunteer work includes being an LAPD Specialist Reserve for traumatic events as well as having served on the Red Cross’s disaster services team. Kessler also has worked for a decade in a three-hospital system in Los Angeles. His new book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief. We turned to David Kessler for ideas on how to do that. If we can name it, perhaps we can manage it. One colleague mentioned that what she felt was grief. But we also talked about how we were feeling. We talked about the content we’re commissioning in this harrowing time of a pandemic and how we can help people. Some of the HBR edit staff met virtually the other day - a screen full of faces in a scene becoming more common everywhere. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers.
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