Rocio Magnani
07/10/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 07/10/2021 6:00 AM
Graciela is a nurse and did not miss a single day to the nursing home where she works.
He was just on duty when he caught the coronavirus.
The protocols were strict, but the virus sneaked in anyway.
When she returned home, where she lived with her 29-year-old son, she passed the disease on to him.
There was no coherence: he died.
The pandemic has a "this too will pass" that is not measured in the number of days left to leave the mask.
A form of resilience that cannot be achieved with vaccines and that, far from resisting pain, seeks to accept it.
In Argentina,
we are very close to reaching the 100,000 death toll.
In the world, about 4 million people died from Covid.
Friends have already been laid off in almost all offices, factories, hospital guards, shops and neighborhoods.
On some occasions, without notice, without funeral and without burial, without presence - or presence.
However, for the closest relatives,
the duel has inexhaustible dimensions
.
Because if learning to live in a world where the people you loved no longer exist is heartbreaking, to do so when what cut the thread could have been transmitted with a hug, seems-minimally- inconceivable.
It was the case of Graciela (not her real name).
"She was working.
Not in a bowling alley or a clandestine one.
He followed all the protocols, did everything right.
But this disease is very cruel.
And how do you not feel guilty for the death of your son if you infected him?
Vivian Mastellone, a member of the “Renacer” grief groups for parents, asks by phone.
The pain is compounded by guilt that is irrational, experts explain.
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Since the pandemic began, the community has not stopped receiving new cases of coronavirus.
In the meetings - virtual, for the moment - a family from Avellaneda arrived a few weeks ago who had just lost a teenage son.
The boy was going through cancer, but he was in good health.
His brother returned to classrooms in March, when face-to-face classes returned.
He caught Covid among colleagues and brought the virus home.
The youngest brother died.
The guilt of infecting and surviving
There is a factor that runs through many of the people who come to the office -also virtual- of the psychologist and grief specialist Diana Hunsche:
"They need to know how the person who died got infected
.
"
Remember the case of a woman who was left a widow after infecting her husband with coronavirus and was very bad because she
believed that she had been infected in the first instance when she saw the grandchildren
.
I was devastated.
Suddenly, he goes to the warehouse in his neighborhood and discovers that it was closed due to Covid cases.
"It was a relief, because it is not the same for a person to have been infected by making an essential purchase than if the family was infected by having participated in a social gathering," he continues.
Closely related to the first fault,
the survivor's fault appears
, explains and defines that it is the one that arises from not being infected by oneself instead of the one who died.
Or the one that appears, having been infected, because one was saved.
“
The same thing happens in a war.
People who are healthy are to blame for being well ”, explains Hunsche and proposes an example: there is a funeral, in which they ask you how you are and you have excellent news, but you tell it in a low voice.
"They are guilt that should not be," he insists.
The transfer of the body of a deceased by Covid to the cemetery.
The guilt of having infected it makes grief difficult.
EFE / Juan Ignacio Roncoroni
With Covid it is not about soldiers, but the same pattern works.
“
Doctors suffer a lot.
The orderlies, the nurses, everyone.
Because they are questioned in their profession by losing patients but also by much more complex emotions, "he says.
A doctor he treated in therapy told him, for example, that he had saved a lot of lives from the coronavirus, even those of friends, but not his mother's.
"What fault should a doctor have for not having been able to save his family and others?" Asks the psychologist, who recently published her first book, "A therapy, me?"
In the dialogue with
Clarín
, he proposes to rethink the duel from three points of view:
Deconstruction:
“The way you go through the death of a loved one is your own.
I do not agree with what appears on the Internet that they all follow the same steps.
There are people who do not deny.
There are people who feel rather anger or, in this pandemic, the question of whether it could have been avoided. "
It does not happen by letting go:
“Death does not interrupt the bond.
Lacan said that there is a second death, which is forgetfulness.
Throughout life, you can change the way you remember the person who died and the bond changes as well ”.
A power plant:
“Grief is searching in the memory of your loved one for a force that helps you get ahead.
The memory can give you energy and hope.
And I believe that therapy helps to accelerate processes, not to suffer uselessly and to elaborate guilt and deal with fears ”.
Encapsulated duels
Vivian Mastellone (51) has been a member of Renacer groups for seven years.
Today he participates and collaborates in the coordination of those who have headquarters in Almagro and Avellaneda, in addition to a third party that was created in a pandemic and that does not have a geographic location assigned for when the presence returns that parents from other countries also attend.
Renacer is a mutual aid association that
organizes meetings between parents
in 16 provinces, under the premise that suffering from the loss of a child is not a disease and that it is possible to transform one's own pain into contact and helping others.
In the Flores cemetery, the number of graves in the sector who died from Covid increased.
Photo: EFE / Juan Ignacio Roncoroni
The groups are like a new family and, therefore, the arrival of the pandemic was also so difficult.
Several colleagues were infected.
Horacio Paz, one of them, died on July 27, 2020 at the age of 56, after fighting it for more than 30 days intubated in intensive care.
Horacio had lost his 14-year-old son Facundo almost two years ago.
“He was very supportive, hard-working, a fighter for life, who had a dog kennel and a dog washing service at home.
His wife and other daughter also participated in the meetings.
We were in one when we heard the news, ”says Vivian.
At the time, Vivian and her husband fell ill with the coronavirus.
“My 14-year-old son Iván died 7 years ago in an accident, and you think that if you can with that, you can with everything in life.
And yes, we are prepared for everything.
But when my husband was in intensive care, my world fell apart.
And I was scared for my daughter.
This pandemic increases the fears that one has
”, he says.
Horacio Paz was one of those killed by Covid-19.
In the photo, with her son who died two years earlier, in 2018.
“When another loss arises, it looks like the dam is opening.
Whenever a duel is in progress or was not prepared, in the event of a subsequent loss, it is activated.
But now even more so because death is something that breaks into our daily lives
”, defines Hunsche, who can be followed on Instagram @psicologahunsche.
Threats and post-pandemic
Death is, for many, that kind of white noise that remains after the graph of the news channel.
Today, so many deaths.
Today, three more than yesterday.
Today, just 22 years.
Bodies are revealed to be fragile and life, more finite than ever.
In therapy sessions, it has become a recurring theme.
Each death refers to their own.
For the psychoanalyst Guillermo Bruschtein, a member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), the coronavirus presents an extra challenge when it comes to hurting, which consists of “the singularity that in a pandemic no one escapes from danger”.
“The duels are more complex, because they are not only accompanied by sadness but also by the threat of death.
Even those of us who are here to help are in danger, so we have to work with each other on the emotions that are at stake.
There is an indiscriminate threat, a danger from which one cannot defend oneself ”, he comments.
A couple embraces in the area of the Flores cemetery destined for those killed by Covid.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Bruchstein cared for a patient, in her 70s, who had a son in her 50s who was caring for her.
From one day to the next, he passed away from Covid.
“Losing a child in these circumstances is devastating, because of the pain, the fear of dying too, but also loneliness.
It is an impact, the post-pandemic effect, that we are not yet being able to observe,
”says Bruchstein.
The first vaccines were applied in Argentina on December 29 and so far 40 percent of the population has at least one dose.
The fear of the Delta variant, which caused a re-growth in the United Kingdom, does not allow us to lower our guard.
You have to work hard both with "the question of contagion", that is, how the person was infected, as well as with "the debt for feeling that he was not taken care of well to prevent him from the situation," says Bruchstein.
And here, a plus:
"The care of the elderly is always deficient in a pandemic
.
"
On the one hand, because one of the aspects of care has been distancing, and because many people died after hospitalizations and intensive therapies in which visitors were not allowed.
The psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Harry Campos Cervera treated a son in his office who had a major crisis in the face of his father's illness, despite the fact that he himself had also become ill.
"He had a very serious psychotic break with delusions," he says.
Father and son worked together, and they
were infected almost at the same time
.
But the father was intubated for a long time and at risk of life, and as that went on, the accusation that the son had with himself worsened.
“It
must be said that contagion is never intentional and guilt is always irrational.
We come from a long time contradictory and the laws of restriction often cannot be fulfilled in such a sustained way.
There is a moment when the system is exhausted and one has a need to get together ”, he explains.
Even people who were infected at a clandestine party "in a state of unconsciousness and denial" did not go to that social gathering with the "hostile" intention of purposely infecting themselves and making others sick.
The lack of rituals
For Campos Cervera, the
restrictions that limited the farewell ceremonies do
not help either in the elaboration of these guilty duels
: “Human beings have millenary mechanisms to carry out the elaboration of the mourning of a loved one, such as accompanying them and assisting them in their last moments, a wake, to be able to see it in the drawer, if he is a Catholic, or to pray and go to the cemetery ”.
All these rituals allow "to begin the farewell of loved ones, and when that does not occur, there can be very important traumatic effects."
What is prevented are the known mechanisms to connect with people who die from a loving place.
Campos Cervera recalls, in this sense, that “human beings are ambivalent in our emotions, we feel love and hatred for people.
In relationships, not everything is a bed of roses. "
"If one has the bad luck of being the one who infected the father, unconsciously one appears as the responsible or guilty party and that works as an accusing element in the unconscious of the person:
self-reproaches
", he defines.
"A person dies and it is a second, but one does not assimilate the quick duel, until the token falls on you, you cannot believe it", says by phone Nora Nieto, a neighbor of the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Coghlan who created a workshop seven years ago of mourning in the framework of the community workshops of the Pirovano Hospital Neighborhood Mental Health Program.
She is not a psychologist, she clarifies.
The workshops are a meeting of an hour and a half of people who went through the same experience:
grief, understood as both a physical loss and the end of a couple
.
“Today, when you are hospitalized for Covid or for something else, the contact that the patient has with family members and vice versa is null.
It is very restricted.
And that's a very painful part to carry, ”he says.
Vivian, from Renacer, remembers Horacio's farewell with a broken voice.
As they could not watch him in person, they decided to hold a virtual meeting to pay tribute to him.
Others went to the cemetery.
The rituals allow "to begin the farewell of loved ones," say psychologists. Photo Shutterstock
“I think we must not forget that even though the worst happened to us, those of us who are in mourning are still on this side - reflects the woman, who today works as a therapeutic companion, in memory of her son who had autism- -, and in honor of those who preceded us, what saves and heals us is to
think and help heal others
”.
Where to ask for free duel accompaniment
The Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) provides care in the face of the Covid-19 emergency.
Registration at www.apa-covid-19.com
The list of mutual aid groups for parents who lost their children "Renacer" can be consulted at www.renacerba.com.ar
"Chatting my duels" is one of the workshops of the Pirovano Hospital Neighborhood Mental Health Program that runs on Mondays at 7:00 p.m. by videoconference: www.talleresdelpirovano.com.ar
The Suicide Attention Center (CAS) is open every day from 8 to 2 through line 135 (free from the City and Greater Buenos Aires) and (011) 5275-1135 (for the rest of the country)
ACE
Look also
Close victims: in the second wave of Covid, statistics went from personal pain
"I could not say goodbye": how to go through the mourning of the deaths of the pandemic