“Death is sexy in popular culture, but there’s nothing sexy about grief,” said Dr. Mary Ellen Macdonald, a medical anthropologist who is part of the team behind Grief Literacy. “It’s not curable. The only way to cure grief is to grieve. It’s this process that you have to go through – and often, you’re going to go through it alone.”

Part of our grief literacy must include pronouncing once and for all that whatever “normal” was is dead and buried. Only the most privileged and the least affected will insist on “going back to normal.” We must walk—emerge from the pandemic, not regress to “normal”—and talk--talk to our grief. We must speak it because as with any language, the more you use it the more fluent you become.