‘It’s all here’: Anger, Denial and the Hope

COVID Grief Transformed

For all the ways I tried to help patients during the COVID pandemic—especially through the ceaseless routine of bereavement calls—things didn’t always go as I’d hoped, or even as I’d envisioned in my worst nightmares.

One spouse asked if there was any way to retrieve her husband’s possessions as he struggled in the ICU. In normal circumstances, we could walk possessions to the lobby for waiting family members or drop their deliveries off to patients. But this wife didn’t drive and had no one to help her. This meant a few large bags that included electronics, a watch, and clothing were stuck in the hospital.

I wanted to help. The wife lived just a few miles from the hospital; why not leave the bags on her porch on my way home? She was glad to accept my offer and we made arrangements.

When I arrived, I texted her and waited in my car by the street. She opened the door and picked up the bags. I then asked her to go through them. Ten minutes later, she leaned out the door.

“Do you have everything?”

She confirmed, “Yes, thank you. It’s all here.” She gave me a huge thumbs up. I drove home, feeling I had done a good deed for the day and uplifted that I could help.

Soon after, she gave me a huge piece of her mind.

A Missing Ring, a Heavy Heart

When her spouse succumbed to COVID, I made the bereavement call and cried with her. I walked her through the funeral process. During those first intense months of the pandemic, the pastoral care team averaged nearly one bereavement call an hour.

A few days later, I left her a message to offer my support and ear to listen. I made such calls daily. But when she called back, her venom stunned me: “You took it. I know you took it. The funeral home did not have his ring and it’s not in his things. You or someone at your hospital took it!”

I spent a good bit of time trying to calm her before I directed her to patient care staff, who could conduct a formal investigation and re-trace her husband’s belongings. When I hung up, I felt a sharp sting in my stomach—as though someone had shoved a wedding band down my throat.

Anger is a part of grief; my brain registered that quickly. A deceased loved one’s possessions often represent the last things they can cling to.

But my heart had been knocked off balance. Even with the patient-to-chaplain distance, my work is that of the soul, of heart-to-heart comfort. I knew how I tried to help, but all of that had been thrown back in my face in a personal attack. I felt violated.

That night, I swallowed my own grief in a bottle of wine.

I never offered to take possessions to someone’s house again.

Anger and Grief

Grief, I have learned, never occurs in neat stages. Rather, we must mount stairsteps of emotions. When you get to the top of those stairs, it feels less like an epiphany and more like a jumble of emotions resembling a bottomless bowl of spaghetti: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I believe it’s no coincidence that such steps parallel the seven stages experienced by the dying as identified by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

The wife I had walked with never made it to the last stage: acceptance. Is movement toward acceptance possible for everyone? Over time, yes. But it will look very different depending on whom you ask as no two spaghetti bowls will tangle in the same way.

The heaping bowl of grief can go like this:

Grief and denial: “This can’t be happening.”

Then anger: “I don’t like this! I hate this! Something more should have been done to prevent this!”

Followed by guilt: “If only I did something different, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Or anger, guilt, and denial in the same breath: “I’m so upset that something more was not done! I should have done more.”

In grief, anger is seeking control of the uncontrollable. We want to reverse death and make it not be so. In so many cases, who doesn’t want that?

Surprisingly, anger can be a healthy recognition of our lack of control: a release. But the same sword that can clear a thicket of confusion can also sever every relationship in its path and leave a trail of darkness. I would not tell a grieving person not to be angry—even the spouse who released it on me.

Anger can also be wielded in creative ways as we prepare ourselves to move on.

A grieving husband once hung up on my bereavement phone call. Yet he called me back a week later and without introduction and some excitement in his voice. “You know what I did today? I took a chisel and hammer to the couch she laid on for weeks!”

When I return to the journal entries I made when my parents passed away, I can read the anger—even if the words themselves are practically illegible. Why didn’t they care for themselves? Why did they rob my kids of grandparents at their graduations? The answers weren’t what I sought so much as to voice and acknowledge my grief. I didn’t even know that anger was in my life at the time until I asked myself years later, “Why am I still feeling so down and depressed?

Anger is an energy. Grief is an energy. Honor those feelings. But anger also has consequences: don’t break off the relationships that could provide you comfort and compassion when you need them most.

I have no idea what happened to the grieving spouse.

My prayer is that on many levels, she found the ring she was looking for.