It’s been happening more and more in the last few weeks, as places continue to open up, as capacity increases at restaurants and other venues, as live performance makes a comeback, as we venture out into the world, vaccinated — for those of us who are — and maskless — for those who feel comfortable heeding the CDC’s considerably looser guidelines.

And though a part of me isn’t surprised, given the quick-fix/push-forward/Band-Aid culture we live in, I am jarred very time the idea of “normalcy” surfaces, jolted by the dissonance of this rush to “return to,” of the picking up of life before its utter upending.

I cringe with each version of this “back to normal” mantra, a scream trapped in my throat.

Yes, after the impossible year it’s been, the struggles we’ve endured, the isolation and upheaval, the days of deep uncertainty, we all want to exhale. To let go of the worry and fear, to feel the fullness of light and joy as we reunite with friends and family and reach for the things, the places, the activities that used to bring us happiness.

I, too, am looking forward to living with less restraint and risk. Yet after a year of being so cautious, of constantly wondering if our breathing, the very thing that keeps us alive, could be the cause of harm to me, someone dear to me or a stranger’s beloved, re-entry has felt more fraught. And deeply tender. I can’t fully abandon caution, am not ready to embrace all that filled my life pre-pandemic.

But more than that, it feels like this is a moment of pause. A moment where, untethered from survival mode, my body, my spirit, my heart are finally catching up to what it’s been like to live through this last year. To witness such profound suffering and loss. To hold the relentlessness of state-sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies. To cycle through terror, anxiety, furor, numbness, sorrow, hopelessness — to feel precariously perched on an emotional see-saw, amidst near-constant brain fog, fatigue that cut to the bone.

I know my experience throughout this pandemic has been one of greater privilege and comfort. My family and I have our health, our homes, our jobs. But we are not unscathed. Not unclaimed by grief.

I think especially of my mom, whose best friend Julie, her everyday person, died suddenly of cancer in November. One day, as the three of us were walking, she chalked up not feeling her best to a bout of food poisoning. Two months later, just before starting chemo, she never returned from the hospital where she was receiving her care. When my mom and I talk about her, we still can’t believe she’s gone.

I think, too, of my friends, whose parents died in the last year. Friends who couldn’t say goodbye, offer the comfort of touch, some who are still waiting to hold a memorial service.

And when I think of the millions of bereaved left behind by COVID-19 — millions traumatized not just by the death of their loved ones but the circumstances of their dying and inability to mourn accompanied by our traditional rites and rituals — normal feels even farther away.

Those of us who have experienced the death of a beloved know there is never a going back to what was, only a “new normal,” and even that seems ill-fitting for the ways we are made and remade by grief, marked by its lifelong embrace. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for joy, for hope, for praising beauty, trilling laughter, tending the good in our days. But it is often the willingness to honor and inhabit our grief, to work it as it works us, that allows us to open to the living that waits inside its aching depths.

Many grievers have yet to begin that process of acknowledgment and integration, a journey that requires so much more than time. Many lack support and access to mental health care to help them navigate and carry their grief. Some are still trying to survive other stressors that strip the urgency from their sorrows. But even heartbreak stuffed into shadows leaks out, erupts in small quakes, until the pain will no longer be contained.

When I hear comments about “things getting back to normal,” I think of them, the ones struggling to put one foot in front of the other on that long, lonely road. And of the front line health care workers besieged by depression, anxiety, insomnia. And of the morgues that overflowed. And the funeral homes that turned away the grieving. And the COVID long haulers. And the communities ripped apart by violence. And the COVID learning gap. And the shuttered businesses. And every heightened and widened disparity … And all of us holding grief and loss. Of every kind, named and unnamed. All of us still wary, wounded, irreversibly changed by a year whose repercussions are sure to be as enduring as they are unknown.

To suggest a return to normal doesn’t allow space to honor and sit with the immensity of what we’ve been through. To charge full-tilt into every bright and beckoning celebration without acknowledging our collective grief and trauma seems dismissive of the pain too many are carrying.

Of course, I appreciate the desire to celebrate, the anticipation of making and having plans again, the euphoria of all those first hugs.

And I also believe we need to tend to our healing, to come together, to create spaces to speak our losses out loud, to wrap ourselves in community and tell our stories, cry our tears, move our grief, our anxiety, our fears through our bodies.

From the very start of the pandemic, I insisted there would be no return to normal, preferred the word “emergence,” the way it felt slower, more deliberate and mindful. Allowed for constant deep and nourishing breaths. For rest and reflection. For moving forward together, attuned to our shared humanity and suffering. Willing to risk a greater vulnerability and compassion, to say “I see you. I am here for you. We belong to each other.

‘Together, let’s love this world into being all it can be.”

Can we banish the phrase 'back to normal'?