Sarah Jaffe

And whenever we say Black Lives Matter and we say, you know, say their names, we're talking about grieving.

We're talking about, you know, that George Floyd should still be here, that Breonna Taylor should still be here.

There was this moment, right, when Joe Biden got elected and he sort of talked about his personal grief.

And I think that was meaningful for people.

That was really part of the reason people voted for him, you know.

And then they had sort of one commemoration for COVID.

And then it was quickly like back to normal, back to normal, back to normal.

Right.

When I was working on the book, I talked to sort of therapists and clinicians and practitioners about COVID.

grief and about how they deal with it and how they help people deal with it.

And so these are, you know, where I sort of learned these terms and disenfranchised grief is, again, a grief that can't be acknowledged, a grief that isn't recognized.

People are carrying around a lot of unacknowledged pain.

And that comes out, if we're lucky, it comes out in ways that are just sort of messy.

If we're really not lucky,

It gets toxic and it can destroy your relationships.

It can destroy your grip on reality.

It can destroy all sorts of things.

It can destroy your health, right?

It was so shocking to me how physical grieving was.

Talking to clinicians and people, it was like, yeah, I see people with flare-ups of autoimmune conditions when they're grieving.