The Summer of Love — and Healing

I cried the first time I hugged a friend on the street. It felt that good.

I’ve been wondering this week about how our kids might be feeling as the culture lurches toward a new relationship with Covid 19. I wonder is it harder to look forward to the future? To trust parents, adults, public figures? I wonder if they are carrying judgments or shame about who wore a mask, hoarded toilet paper, threw a party? I wonder if permanent damage was done to their outlooks or if we’re on the verge of a summer of long hugs, music festivals and forgetting?

I needed a therapist to help me think.

Karen Moon started her professional life as an in house counselor for Merrill Lynch. When an employee had a sudden loss or the company experienced trauma (as in the Oklahoma City bombing or 9/11), Karen was sent in to help professionals process the shock and grief. After many years of that, she transitioned to private practice to meet with adolescents.

During the pandemic, she’s had a couple thousand conversations with high school and college kids. As we head into summer, she has thoughts about what we can expect of our kids and how we might help during the summer of healing that is upon us.

Before I share my notes from our conversation, I wanted to make two meta points:

1 — The range of suffering in the past year is pretty wide. For 578,000 families, the loss was permanent. Today we’re thinking about teenagers and college kids but of course, this is…