How To Cut Our Covid Losses

It’s been a tough two years but experts think we can progress if we just become a little more resilient, writes Jane E Brody

- Jane E Brody

Many people I know are waiting, patiently or otherwise, for life to return to normal. We are eager for the day when we can again live without fear of a deadly virus that lurks like a stalker, disrupting social and cultural events, travel, education, work and life’s milestones that once missed, can never be retrieved. How, so many of us wonder, are we supposed to cope with so many obstacles blocking our way forward?

One way is to call upon an age-old characteristic that enables us to weather adversity: resilience. Resilience is the ability to roll with the punches, “because if you’re brittle, you’ll break,” said Pauline Boss, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and author of the recently published book, The Myth of Closure. Boss, a family therapist, educator and researcher, is best known for her pioneering work on “ambiguous loss,” which is also the title of her 1999 book depicting unresolved, and often unresolvable, physical or emotional losses.

“When the pandemic subsides, things will not go back to ‘normal’,” said Boss, who at 87 has lived through multiple upheavals, starting with the Second World War. With all that has happened during the pandemic, she wrote, “we can’t expect to go back to the ‘normal’ we had”.

In an interview, she told me, “Normal implies status quo, but things are always changing, and if you don’t change, you don’t grow. We will never be the same again. The pandemic is epic, a power greater than us, and we have to be flexible, resilient enough to bend in order to survive. And we will survive, but our lives will be forever changed.”