A city’s ‘disenfranchised grief,’ four years in the making

Detroit has a long memory. The city refuses to forget redlining, the Malice Green murder, or that historic Black neighborhoods were displaced by highways.

It’s not that we’ve forgotten COVID-19, but it also seems we don’t quite know how to remember the pandemic that has taken 4,015 lives in the city — 1,500 of them during just a few terrible months in 2020.

Many of us don’t want to remember.

Other Detroiters are still coming to grips with profound personal losses and want public recognition and support for their grief. And still others are leery of talking about the pandemic in the past tense.

Some warn that we are struggling, so far, to balance the deeply human need to move on against the full spectrum of grief and anger that continues to swirl through the city, even if we can’t see it every day. Unresolved grief can exacerbate the risk of suicide, substance misuse, and other health problems.

“I’m ready to move on, but there is no moving on because my life has changed so much, and every day there is a reminder of the losses I experienced,” said Biba Adams, a freelance writer whose mother, grandmother and aunt were among Detroit’s early pandemic victims.

Politics and the human impulse to move on

The impulse to move on is understandable, even unavoidable. Who wants to linger over memories of loss, isolation, nasal swabs, missed graduations and virtual school?

Most Americans (though less than half of Democrats) now believe that the pandemic is “over ,” though 43% say their lives will never return to normal, according to a March Gallup Poll.

“Stimuli that suggest the presence of COVID are less common now — people wearing masks, dire public health messages, acquaintances who have the disease,” Glenn Weisfeld, an emeritus professor of psychology at Wayne State University, said in an email. “This makes sense — as a danger recedes, we turn our attention to other things that affect our happiness and well-being.”

Human nature isn’t the only force pushing the pandemic out of the spotlight.

Jamon Jordan, the City of Detroit’s official historian, traces the national avoidance of the topic to the country’s poor performance during the pandemic. More Americans have died per capita than their peers in wealthy countries worldwide. Jordan’s mother died of COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, and he is haunted by the thought that she might have survived if political leaders had been more prepared and proactive.

As the two pandemic-era presidents gear up for a rematch election in November, Jordan noted that they both seem more eager to claim victory than address the pandemic’s ongoing impacts. Grassroots efforts to create a national memorial have gotten little traction so far.

“Our society doesn’t want to go back and revisit it because it’s shameful what happened,” Jordan said.

How does a city remember?

Detroit tried to help people attend to their grief. The city’s office of Arts, Culture, and Entrepreneurship organized a memorial on Belle Isle, where a long line of cars and hearses circled the island, pausing to take in the 907 portraits of COVID-19 victims that lined the road.

Adams contributed her mother’s portrait to the event, which she found deeply meaningful. Her mother, grandmother and aunt died within the first five weeks of the pandemic.

“They were my everything,” said Adams, a native Detroiter. “And they were always together, which is how they all got sick.”

Adams doesn’t like the idea of an annual pandemic memorial day, which she worries would compound her grief. She wants to be able to visit a permanent memorial to the disease’s victims, maybe a statue or mural.

But there are no plans for a permanent memorial in the city, and city spokesperson John Roach said he doesn’t know of any plan to officially recognize the four-year anniversary.

The city and local organizations put on an interactive memorial that was designed with the artist Sonya Clark and displayed at Huntington Place for almost two years. A new transit station has been named after a city bus driver who died of COVID-19 .

For many, working through feelings about COVID-19 has been a personal, not collective, journey.

“There is a smaller group of people who are deeply personally impacted, and they’re challenging this larger majority that want to feel comfortable with this as in the past,” said Rachel Frierson, a senior director at the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy who helped organize the Huntington Place memorial.

“There is this feeling that businesses and politicians and even regular citizens to some degree do not want us to remember, do not want us to go back to one of the worst times in many of our lives,” Jordan said.

Adams agreed.

“A million people died, and that means a million families — tens of millions of people who had their lives changed … People want to push us aside.”

The risks of ‘disenfranchised grief’

Dr. Farha Abbasi doesn’t buy the idea that we are divided into two camps: those ready to get over the pandemic and those who are still grieving. Just about everyone, she said, could likely do with processing their pandemic experiences.

“I think we are minimizing,” said Abbasi, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University. “I am always a proponent of being with the pain, and I think as a society we have developed the idea that we should be pain free.”

Roughly a century ago, the 1918 flu pandemic killed roughly 675,000 Americans in three years, a massive death toll. That pandemic was nearly six times as deadly for the U.S. as World War I, which happened around the same time. Yet scholars say that regular people’s suffering was largely ignored at the time. Today, there are few public memorials to its victims.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been far better documented and the stories of its victims told much more thoroughly, said Nancy Bristow, professor of history at the University of Puget Sound. For instance, Americans are still invited to add their COVID-19 stories to an audio archive run by StoryCorps and the Library of Congress.

But Bristow, who wrote a book on the 1918 pandemic, sees parallels in today’s public urge to move on.

“What I don’t think is any different is the public remembering,” she said. “Here we are, right in the middle of the fourth anniversary, and there’s very little attention paid to it.”

The lack of historical records and cultural changes since 1918 mean there’s no way to know how all that silent grief affected people who lived through it, Bristow said.

Abbasi believes the costs this time around could be severe. The COVID-19 pandemic is shaping up as a case study in “disenfranchised grief,” or grief that is denied or unrecognized publicly, she said.

This phenomenon is particularly common in marginalized communities, whose grief is less likely to be taken seriously, she noted. Age-adjusted data show that Black, Latino and Indigenous communities in the U.S. have the highest rates of death from COVID-19 .

Buried grief can have serious consequences like depression, addiction and interpersonal violence, Abbasi said.

Remembering something that isn’t over?

Some Detroiters have little choice but to view COVID-19 and its effects as a present-day challenge. It’s a group that includes healthcare workers, teachers, medically vulnerable people and their caregivers, and people suffering from long-COVID.

“COVID isn’t just a memory but an ongoing reality,” a Detroiter living with long COVID, who asked not to be identified because of stigma associated with the illness, said in an email. “But even amongst close friends and family, people who I know care deeply about me, it feels there is very little space to express this grief. There is simply no way for them to really understand my experience. And because of the nature of the illness, they really don’t see the extent of my suffering.”

Nurses and doctors who worked long, often terrifying hours to provide healthcare during the pandemic, are still dealing with high work loads and symptoms of burnout. A recent University of Michigan study found that 94% of Michigan nurses report being emotionally exhausted .

“I don’t think our healthcare system or our service industry has fully recovered,” said Stephanie Preston, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “People are still having to work too many hours. They’re still having problems.

“When your stress is low, you can focus on repair and recovery,” she added. “But when stress is high, that goes out the window, and you’re only focused on your acute immediate needs. So I think a lot of people are actually still in that mode of acute need and stress.”

The COVID-19 memorial at Huntington Place welcomed all kinds of pandemic-borne grief, Frierson said.

Participants were invited to write down a memory from the pandemic, sew it into a fabric pouch and seal it with prayer beads. Volunteers explained to visitors that they could write about anything that happened to them during the pandemic.

“The stories that people told when they were doing these pouches… that also created a moment of collective grief,” Frierson said. “People just kind of wanted to talk or tell about something that happened to them.”

That memorial now includes 6,000 pouches. It’s currently sitting in storage at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills. Laura Mott, chief curator of the museum, said she hopes it will be displayed again in the city eventually, perhaps on something like the 10th anniversary of the pandemic in 2030.

“It does kind of belong to the City of Detroit,” she said. “It’s a precious thing.”

Get help with grief

Grief counseling is available, in person and online, for low or no cost.

Various churches and nonprofits in the Detroit area host drop-in grief support groups.

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