Why We Are Not in Deep Mourning

Photo by Andrey Zvyagintsev on Unsplash

According to Worldometer at the time I write this, 92,072 Americans have died of COVID-19.

Yet, we aren’t doing national days of mourning. In fact, many people don’t even seem upset by those numbers. Instead, we’re stressed out by finances, worried about ourselves, our family, and our friends. But we aren’t, as a whole, mourning (with the exception of those who have lost a family member or friend).

Are we really that callous as a nation? Or is something else going on?

The Stages of Grief

There are five stages of grief:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

We don’t necessarily go through all of these or go through them in the same order. We don’t stay in them for the same length of time. But the end of the journey is acceptance — the final acknowledgment that the thing or person being grieved is indeed gone.

If you look around…or spend 5 minutes on Facebook…you’ll see people hanging out in all of the first four.

“It’s a hoax” — Denial

“If we just all stay home until there’s a vaccine it will be okay” — Bargaining