While the COVID-19 pandemic has created many forms of suffering for everyone, one of the most challenging aspects has been the ways it has restricted individuals from grieving together, in person.
Last month, the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) hosted a Service of Remembrance to honor community members it has lost during the pandemic. The ceremony was conducted via Zoom and led by Reverend Hiram Brett, CMHC’s chaplain.
“We decided to give people a chance to come together and share their common loss,” said Reverend Brett. “Clients, colleagues, and others had died, and the community grieved deeply.”
Regardless of being on screen, the service exhibited real humanity. It was divided into three sections: client remembrance, staff/colleague remembrance, and community reflection. Each section was accompanied by music (recorded and live) and included poems read by staff members. “Through different prayers, poems, music, and reflection,” explained Reverend Brett, “we hoped to open space for all who assembled to heal in peace.”
Music set the mood for the occasion. “We wanted the service to be universal,” said Reverend Brett, “so we incorporated gospel, spiritual, and meditative music into the ceremony.” By including a range of musical styles, the service invoked a sense of funeral rites while avoiding traditional church songs.
Poems and prayers reinforced the sense of inclusiveness. Reverend Brett sampled Catholic, Baháʼí, Buddhist, and Islamic prayers to honor the deceased and comfort the attending. In addition, he said, “Poems were an important part of getting people to open up, and allowed people from all levels of CMHC to have a voice.” People from across different CMHC units, including inpatient and outpatient teams, clinicians, administrative staff, and interns, were selected as readers.
Each section of the service included a moment of reflection. This time allowed for those who were deeply affected by COVID to talk about the experience and connect with the community. Speakers included peer support specialists, various staff members, and CEO Michael Sernyak, MD.
While the service originated as a time to remember those who were lost to COVID-19, Reverend Brett realized that his community had not adequately mourned the deaths of many others who passed away during the past year due to other causes. Victims of mass shootings, police brutality, and other forms of domestic terrorism were also uplifted with the same reverence as those who were members of CMHC.
“We wanted to address community loss as well as personal loss,” Reverend Brett explained. “It was important that the attendants had the space to mourn anyone who was significant in their lives, whether it was a personal relationship or not.”
Clients, colleagues, and others had died, and the community grieved deeply.
Reverend Hiram Brett, CMHC Chaplain
Organizing the event became a collaborative effort involving multiple levels of the CMHC community. Even the Ethics Committee was brought in to consult on how to respect privacy and make the service HIPAA compliant. One challenge was the inability to cite deceased clients by name. Since HIPAA disallows this practice, Reverend Brett, with support from the Ethics Committee, recommended that people mute themselves on Zoom so they could openly say the names of whomever they wished to mourn.
“We were able to have people uplift the names of those they had lost,” he reflected. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that in person.”
Reverend Brett said the experience was deeply spiritual for him. “I try to be attendant to everyone’s grief and their different faith traditions, and this ceremony highlighted the commonality between us,” he reflected. He plans to host more services like this one in the future to support the spiritual and emotional needs of those at CMHC.
“I think that the pandemic has given people a heightened awareness of how important it is to grieve and have a ritual to say goodbye to your loved ones,” said Reverend Brett. Because in-person ceremonies have not been feasible during much of COVID, online gatherings are critical for reinforcing a sense of community when so many have experienced physical, emotional, or spiritual isolation.
The people whom the CMHC community has lost will never be forgotten. For Reverend Brett, Maya Angelou captured it best in her poem “When Great Trees Fall,” read during the service:
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.