We’ve all heard comparisons made between the current pandemic and the tragedy of 9/11 and the economic crash of 2008. Particularly in the midst of them, these societal crises have exerted a strong grip on our every move, decision, conversation, and activity. They have catapulted us into waves of individual and collective anxiety and grief. This creates a stranglehold on our psyche – both our individual and collective psyche. 

Single people who want to date may see this possibility come to a screeching halt; singles may also feel cheated out of getting to know someone better whom they had just become acquainted with before the lockdown; couples in which one or both are in the medical field may now feel apprehensive about physical and sexual intimacy, people who are partnered but not living together may be reconfiguring that arrangement. People on the cusp of a serious commitment may have accelerated things and find themselves living together, either by choice or some other circumstance, where such sudden intimacy may be followed by disillusion. And still, others may be couples nearing the brink of a break-up or divorce or contemplating it, and now find themselves cooped up together because of lockdowns during the pandemic.

An unhappy relationship in which people feel trapped can feel like living inside a homemade jail. But, during a lockdown, and when places for pursuing pleasure and joy are also largely unavailable, it’s the feeling of a homemade jail nestled in a large federal prison. With a global pandemic creating economic disaster on a scale we can still barely comprehend, it’s much more likely that couples will be residing together not just while they are coming to terms with a divorce on the horizon but living together after the separation or divorce. Much of this will be out of economic necessity.

For couples who were already contemplating divorce before the pandemic or where the experience of sheltering in place confirms the desire and need to pursue a divorce, the challenge is to care for one’s mind, heart and body in ways that might feel more challenging now. In the months before I expressed to Mark that I needed a divorce, I relied on daily five-mile walks around Lake Waban in Wellesley. Before I moved out of Massachusetts, I took many photos there that I later enlarged, framed, and hung in my current home. They remind me of all my meanderings and how I found my way. They remind me of the strength and flexibility in nature that I try to cultivate in myself. They remind me of how nature can save us, even from ourselves. And, they remind me of the crooked path of grief and how I learned to come home to myself. In this current moment with so many closures, it becomes imperative to find spaces and places, inside and outside, that are yours alone for reflection and searching.

The process of divorce is filled with grief because it’s a sort of death. It’s the death of a family unit, a structure, a way of being, a way of having a self in the world. So much needs to be reconfigured physically and reimagined psychically. There is no denying how hard, lonely, and confusing it is to grieve the loss of an important intimate relationship. And all of that is compounded in this intense time of global grief and uncertainty. It’s like living in concentric circles of wild, raw, unrelenting grief. Individual and collective grief both shake us to our core, calling on us to pay attention to what matters, to bear witness to pain. Yet both also stretch us to do something else that is always worth doing – thinking about what home means, how we make a home, how confined or free we feel in our home, and how to come home to ourselves again and again.