Name: The isolation of grief in the pandemic
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The isolation of grief in the pandemic

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The Verge logo. Many people adopted a pet during the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife and I just lost one.&nbsp;Gouda, our eight-and-a-half-year-old exotic shorthair cat, died on April 16th. We rushed him to the hospital the previous morning after he spent another night vomiting. The doctors weren’t sure what was wrong, but, over the course of 24 hours, signs pointed to fatal kidney disease. We made the difficult choice to euthanize him.&nbsp;The events would have been horrible under any circumstances. But I found that the forced isolation of the pandemic made even more challenging than I could have possibly imagined.We were stranded in pods of sadnessMy wife and I spent the majority of the 24 hours inside a Zipcar parked outside the animal hospital. Due to safety regulations, we couldn’t wait in the lobby, so we — and all of the other families worried about their pets — waited alone in our cars. Despite being feet away from each other, we were all worlds apart, stranded in pods of sadness made of metal and glass. Once, we watched as a woman handed off her cat to the veterinary staff, got back in her car, and broke down sobbing.&nbsp;We spent hours staring blankly at the tall hedges in front of our car. My wife’s iPhone was a lifeline and a curse. With each passing second, we desperately hoped for a call, but each time the phone finally rang, the news was worse.&nbsp;As we attempted to sleep in the Zipcar overnight, the phone was perched on the dashboard. I stared at it in between fits of sleep, dreading when it would ring. We could never talk to the vets in person, meaning we couldn’t see body language, facial expressions, eye contact — nonverbal cues that would have helped us make the most difficult decision of our lives.Our masks filled with snotWhen we went in to see Gouda for our final goodbye, we sat in a dimly lit room on a soft couch. Our masks constantly filled up with snot. From the other side of the room, the staff told us we couldn’t be with Gouda when he died. There would be no easy way to be six feet apart.The only time we were close to another human being is when they handed Gouda to us, wrapped in a blanket, cone around his neck, and drugged out of his mind. As soon as we were alone with him, we ripped off our masks so we could kiss him one last time.We got the last phone call on the ride home from the hospital. Gouda had died peacefully. Right after, my wife and I realized we didn’t want to be home, but we had nowhere else to go. We’re not vaccinated from COVID-19 yet, so we can’t see our family or friends in person to find solace. We couldn’t escape our empty studio apartment.Out of habit, we opened the front door gingerly. Every day for more than eight and a half years, Gouda had always greeted us, sometimes throwing his whole body against the door in his excitement to see us. But he wasn’t there.Instead, we saw his food bowl, his scratching post, his toys. Our apartment had been the one place we had felt truly safe during the pandemic, but it was now filled with reminders of our missing family member.&nbsp;So we began to clean.&nbsp;We had to face this part of the grief as just the two of usUsually, getting rid of things comes easily to my wife and me. We have internalized much of what Marie Kondo writes about in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. But this was different. It was harder than any cleaning we had done before because the things we got rid of were the reminders of our missing family member. We couldn’t fully move on if we kept them, but that didn’t make it easy to let them go. And because of the pandemic, we couldn’t ask others to come over and help. We had to face this part of the grief as just the two of us.I will never know how grieving this death would have been different if we weren’t still in the pandemic. I do think it made the worst moments even worse. It trapped us in our car. It kept us from him in the hospital. It separated us from our families. It locked us in our home with the memories of our lost family member.&nbsp;And yet, the pandemic forces us to face our grief head-on. My wife and I are healing, slowly. We spend the day crying and remembering. We say one nice thing about Gouda before bed. Because we are vulnerable with each other, I don’t feel like I’m bottling up any feelings, so my mind doesn’t race, and I can go to sleep.&nbsp;I thanked every one of Gouda’s thingsKondo recommends thanking objects that you remove from your house to acknowledge the role they played in your life. I did that for every one of Gouda’s things. “Thank you, scratching post,” I said. “Thank you, plastic Easter egg. Thank you, food placemat.” I even thanked his litter box.Thanking Gouda’s things may sound trivial. But it was one of the few rituals left to me during the pandemic, when so much has been taken away, and it helped me recognize everything that Gouda gave to me. He taught me responsibility, caring for and feeding him every day. He taught me how to play, crouching just out of sight around the bed so that he could spring toward me. He taught me about love, snuggled above my head on my pillow in the middle of the night.&nbsp;Thank you, Gouda.Most Popular DiOS 16 should let us swipe down for notifications.Antonio makes an excellent point here that completely slipped by me in the months I’ve been using the iOS 16 betas. Swiping down on the home screen is part of my muscle memory for Spotlight, but now that there’s an always present button on the home screen to launch Spotlight, the swipe down gesture could easily be repurposed for Notification Center. Or at least give us the option.With iOS 16 apple now gives you TWO different ways to do a search on your home screen (swipe down from center and tap the pill button at the bottom). This would have been the perfect chance to switch that down swipe to pull down the notification shade, which is all I want in iOS— Antonio G. Di Benedetto (@SuperAntonio64)DGoogle’s first-party Pixel 6 case proves to be junk.I immediately had the impression that Google’s official cases for the Pixel 6 were awful , but a long-term review from 9to5Google shows just how bad they can get.Here’s to hoping Google does better with the Pixel 7 cases this year.[9to5Google]Worshippers of Elon Musk have flocked to the middle of nowhere in Texas to watch SpaceX’s attempts to build a space-worthy rocket — and to find friends JSony’s State of Play event starts at 6PM ETYou probably shouldn’t expect an announcement on the level of Nintendo’s , but fingers are crossed for news of some kind about God of War Ragnarok in the . The show will air on&nbsp;&nbsp;and&nbsp;.Revolutionizing the media with blog postsMust ReadsMust ReadsAUber will pay $100 million to New Jersey for misclassifying drivers, gets to continue misclassifying them.Gizmodo reports that Uber will pay $100 million in back taxes to the state of New Jersey in response to an audit that concluded the company was misclassifying its drivers as independent contractors. But here’s the thing: Uber will pay any amount of money necessary to , because reclassifying them as employees would cause Uber to cease to exist. [Gizmodo]DVictoria Song says the new Fitbit Inspire 3 feels like a product from 2015.Where is the lie?NThe Westworld subreddit is anxious the show will be canceled before the final season.Viewership was way down this season, and the recent changes — including — don’t seem to bode well for what’s been a very expensive show. That said, this season started strong and ended with a whimper, so maybe it’s all for the best.fromJNintendo will announce a release date for the delayed Advance Wars reboot “once it has been determined,” the company told Axios.Advance Wars 1 + 2: Re-Boot Camp, a Nintendo Switch remaster of the first two Advance Wars titles, was delayed from an April launch . It was absent from .I asked Nintendo if Advance Wars 1 + 2 has been cancelled, given the lack of news about it since it was delayed due to the invasion of Ukraine.Nintendo rep's reply: "The release has been delayed. We will announce the new date once it has been determined."— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo)AAlex Jones is on trial yet again.The InfoWars host lost a defamation case over the Sandy Hook shooting by default, and now, a Connecticut jury will decide what he should pay. It’s a near-repeat of a similar case in Texas — but without that state’s limits on financial damages. Jones’ company has filed for bankruptcy, though, setting up a fight over the money.[The New York Times]EThe retail revolution comes for Congress: Rep. Angie Craig found out her son was trading behind her back.“As a mom, I would be grateful if my college student son was not allowed to own or trade stocks. And as a member of Congress, I’m working to pass a law to force him to listen to his mother,” she told The New York Times.[The New York Times]PodcastsPodcastsAApparently Motorola built a fully functional electric Chevy Corvette prototype in the 1990s.The Drive’s Kevin Williams has made what could be one of the greatest EV archeological discoveries of a generation: a 1987 Chevy Corvette EV built by cell-phone pioneer Motorola. This raises so many questions. First and foremost, why the hell was Motorola making cars? Electric cars for that matter? And can I drive it? There’s loads of pics and fun backstory, so I recommend you go check it out. [The Drive]EElon is Elonning again.Musk is wading into the fight between Twitter and security researcher Peiter “Mudge” Zatko again, after. Good luck to whoever at his law firm has been assigned to !Anyone know who the secret clients are? Let’s out them on Twitter rn haha. — Naughtius Maximus (@elonmusk)AThe Twitter whistleblower says he’ll work with Congress on “sorely needed” laws.Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s attorneys say they hope he offered a window into Twitter’s business operations, including details about potential national security risks, during a Senate hearing today. Lawmakers focused on the threat of foreign agents inside Twitter and proposals to reform the FTC.An attorneys' statement:&nbsp;"Mr. Zatko is hopeful that the Committee’s work today has helped educate the public about just how dire the security and privacy situation is at Twitter ... He remains ready, willing and able to be part of the legislative reform that is sorely needed." — Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy)RMark Zuckerberg has very good lawyers.As a way of dragging its heels in , Meta is trying to get as much court-ordered information as it possibly can on rivals like Snapchat and TikTok.The threat here is less that Meta will discover Snapchat’s secret sauce, and more that this (and a dozen other motions) will overwhelm the FTC’s ability to properly try the case with its existing resources.[Bloomberg.com]Most PopularMost PopularEWaze has more torture for your return to the office.The new “pokes fun at the people we can all become at work — acronym-slinging, jargon-parroting, catchphrase machines,” and features phrases like “Make a U-turn: Or what I call ‘circling back.’” Thanks, Waze, but I think I’ll stick with my Boy Band voice directions for now.Our driving experience for the month is designed to help you drive synergy.Let’s table this discussion and see if you can figure out what it is. — waze (@waze)ASpecialized teases its new e-bike brand Globe with a poem and a cheeky logo.Earlier this year, a new sub-brand called Globe dedicated to building high-quality electric utility bikes that are designed specifically to replace car trips. We still don’t know what these bikes will look like, but today the company released its brand statement in the form of a poem, which is cute. Specialized promises it will have more to say on September 27th, so mark you calendars. MA woman is suing San Francisco after the city used DNA from her rape kit to arrest her for an unrelated crime.The police’s practice of using DNA from sexual assault victims to identify suspects in other cases came to light . At the time, legal experts said the practice likely violated California’s constitution. It’s yet another example of the posed by growing DNA databases. [CBSNews]MUbisoft’s AAA games are getting more expensive.In an interview with Axios, CEO Yves Guillemot said that “the big AAA games will come at $70,” starting with Skull and Bones. , however, is listed for $50 .[Axios]JI’m convinced Tears of the Kingdom is going to feature time travel in a big way.The for the game is the second to seemingly show Link . The game’s logo is an ouroboros. And , Nintendo says that “Link’s endless adventure begins again” on the game’s release date, May 12th. If only I could time travel to then.

The Verge logo. Many people adopted a pet during the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife and I just lost one.&nbsp;Gouda, our eight-and-a-half-year-old exotic shorthair cat, died on April 16th. We rushed him to the hospital the previous morning after he spent another night vomiting. The doctors weren’t sure what was wrong, but, over the course of 24 hours, signs pointed to fatal kidney disease. We made the difficult choice to euthanize him.&nbsp;The events would have been horrible under any circumstances. But I found that the forced isolation of the pandemic made even more challenging than I could...

The isolation of grief in the pandemic

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