A Guest Blog Post by Joanna Lima -- The Master Wayfinder in an Ocean of Grief

On 9/11, I felt gutted. Devastated. I had been going along, comfortable, content. Everything felt right in my world. And then, this event. This scary thing happened. I had been ensconced in a warm, safe place for so long and I was forced out of it. My senses were assaulted. The world I knew was gone. Suddenly, I knew what it felt like to feel cold from the inside out. I knew what it meant to feel scared. 

Naturally, having all these feelings, experiencing these sensations, I sought comfort. I wanted my mother. I wanted her to hold me. Somehow, I knew that her touch, her scent would help me feel better. I cried out for her.  

But she wasn’t there. From that day forward she would never be again. And then I knew what it meant to feel terror. 

9/11 is the day that I lost my mother. The woman in whose womb I grew, whose heartbeat I listened to for 22 weeks.  

That’s how I remember 9/11…1979.

You thought I meant 9/11/2001, didn’t you? 

Maybe you thought that because you remember. You remember feeling shock and despair. Maybe you experienced the cold dread that spread through your body as you took in the news of the collapse of the Twin Towers. There were so many emotions. Disbelief. Rage. Fear. And deep, deep sorrow.

Are you too young to remember? Or were you not yet born? Maybe you’ve seen the images. The smoke, the rubble, the devastation.

9/11 was a terrible day in human history. A day we will never forget. 

 9/11 is a terrible day in my personal history, because, as I said, it’s the day I lost my mother. It’s the day that I was born.  

 “Ugh, 9/11’s your birthday. That sucks.” 

For the first decade of the 21st century, I heard this kind of comment a lot when I had to hand over my ID or state my D.O.B. I responded to the wincing with half a shrug. Nothing I can do about it. Over the past several years, I’ve heard the comments less and less. I’m not sure if this is because I no longer look young enough to get carded or if the impact of the terror of 9/11 has started to fade.  

Birthdays are supposed to be joyous occasions. Celebrations of life.  Deathdays can be somber since they mark the anniversary of loss. Until 2001, I struggled privately to reconcile 9/11 as both a birthday and a deathday. When I saw the Twin Towers collapse, I felt validated. My history became public.  My internal experience of grief was suddenly externalized. I could carry it differently.

Now it’s 2020, a year for which there was so much hope: a leap year, an Olympic year, an election year.  Just a couple months ago we were talking about our 20/20 visions. We were excited for Halloween and 4th of July on a Saturday, Christmas and New Year’s on Fridays, Cinco de Mayo on a (taco) Tuesday, and two Friday the 13ths (in March and November). 

With everything cancelled, the Twitterverse is wondering why the eff any of us bothered to get 2020 planners. 

So here we are in the middle of a pandemic, a kind of collective trauma we’ve never experienced before. Suddenly pervasive existential anxiety is palpable. When we say, “we’re all in this together,” what we’re in is fear and grief. The Harvard Business Review published a great article/interview with David Kessler about grief (https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief). Kessler literally wrote the book on grief with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, so I’m not pretending I know more about it than him or her. Or you, for that matter. Since I don’t know your experience with grief, how your body processes it, I’m feeling uncertain as to what to say. I don’t know what words of reassurance to offer you, to help to steady you on these choppy waters.

What I do know is that in an ocean of grief, I am a master wayfinder. I know how to hold my center and I am not afraid to sail into the storm. And I’m not the only one of my kind. 

I’m saying this as an invitation to you to turn to the wayfinders in your life, the healers and survivors and fighters who have come through other storms. They’re already quietly leading us, creatively reinventing self-care and community care as this crisis unfolds.  They’re the ones holding space for our complex, messy reactions, tending to our energetic and spiritual dimensions while our essential workers, especially those in health care on the front lines or in the food supply chain, help us take care of our minds and bodies. 

Even though a lot of us didn’t learn it in the right order, co-regulation comes before self-regulation. In these uncertain times, don’t hesitate to lean on the people in your life who are well-resourced and resourceful. No matter how self-reliant you prefer to be, this isn’t the time to go it alone, to think that you don’t need anyone’s help. The thing about this novel coronavirus is that we’re all vulnerable to it and most of us don’t do vulnerability well, if at all. 

Honor the vulnerability. 

 That’s how you navigate the storm.