Good grief
Making space for big feelings and leaning into the power of communal grieving.
Vol. 51
In This Issue: ESSAY | NOW READ THIS | ON PALESTINE | TAKE ACTION | FINAL FRAME
Last week, my father-in-law died. He had been sick with terminal cancer for the past two years and we knew it was coming, but of course we didn’t truly know until it happened.
He was neither old nor young. We all would have liked him to live a much longer life. That he got two years of living, remaining in his own home, able to visit with his kids and grandkids, and suffer almost no pain, was incredible good fortune that existed in the shadow of the terrible bad luck of his disease.
Denis, my father-in-law, was a lowkey guy, not prone to big displays or physical affection. He showed his love through consistently showing up for the people he loved, lending a hand, giving a little cash when it was needed, cooking really incredible meals, teaching the grandkids how to make pizza and chocolate chip cookies from scratch and letting them take over his home office with a gloriously messy art-making space. A practical and very open minded sort of guy with an incredibly dry sense of humor. Among other things, I’ll miss Sunday dinners at his house, the expertly cooked steaks and creative non-dairy entrees he always made to accommodate my lactose intolerance, and the time to just be present with each other and catch up on life.
They say that grief is evidence of having loved. Grief is love with nowhere to go. Denis’ absence is being grieved by many. And we’ll keep telling stories about and remembering him, which is the kind of - if not immortality, then extra life that we can give to our loved ones. Every time I get to think and talk about someone I love who is dead, the act of remembering, in a way, brings them back to life.
Memory and being able to share memory with others feels like an act of healing. I don’t believe grief ever entirely leaves you, but being able to let it move through you, to really look at and be present with it, and to share it has certainly helped my grief to feel less all-encompassing, less debilitating. It makes grief feel more like a bittersweet tide that ebbs and flows and sometimes overflows, but always reminds me that I’m lucky to have loved and been loved enough to feel it at all.
I’m trying to remember that as I witness what feels like unending horrors in the world around me, too. It’s all well and good to say, “Yes, grief is a part of life, something I must feel in order to remain human,” and quite another to hold onto that as I watch video after video of dead children in homes turned to rubble, cities drowned or burned, tanks crushing gardens under their treads.
Grieving one or two people is overwhelming enough. How does one grieve for entire communities, entire peoples? And I’m not even experiencing those things personally (yet). It can and often does feel like too much.
I see so many of my friends and loved ones struggling with the same weight. Every day there’s a new meme or screenshot of someone wrly joking about the cognitive dissonance of witnessing genocide and climate disaster and the march of fascism and still be expected to show up to work and school and pretend like nothing’s wrong. It’s the same cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced after a major personal loss–suddenly there’s a painful blank space in your life and somehow the sun still rises and sets, and people go about their days around you like nothing is different or wrong. Even those people who know what’s happened often find themselves impatient to move on once a few days or a week or so have passed. I have been guilty of that impulse.
In cultures lacking clear guidance and structure around grief and grieving, especially one built around the relentless grind of capitalism, the pressure is always to keep moving, to remain productive even in the face of tragedy.
I had internalized this lesson enough at the age of 15 that when my own mother died, I only took one day off from school before going back. It wasn’t good for me to be there. My friends had no framework for what to say or do for me, so we mostly ignored it. I went through the motions but I failed several classes that semester. None of the adults thought to just tell me, “Hey, you should go home and take more time to just feel what you need to feel. This can wait.” Instead, I was punished for failing and banned from participating in the extracurricular activities that actually brought joy to my life. The lesson was, “Chin up, deal with it, or else.”
In many ways, that’s what we’re being told to do right now as we bear witness to the genocide in Palestine, the wars in Sudan and Ukraine, the manmade climate disasters in the southeast U.S. and across the globe.
Keep punching the clock and pretend that everything is fine. But it’s very much not fine.
We still haven’t truly, collectively grieved the millions dead and disabled from COVID-19. What does that do to the national psyche, to be forced to move on from such mass loss as though 1) it never happened, and 2) it’s not still happening?
All of this isn’t to say that I believe we should all simply cease to do anything in the face of grief, both personal and collective. I think the lesson for me has been that grieving, to be healthy, must be allowed to happen outside of corporate or political timelines, and it must be communal. Grief should bring us together, not isolate us.
That’s how we stay human in the face of such inhumane systems. To resist the despair that is being weaponized by the very powerful to keep us from doing the thing they fear the most, the thing that most threatens their stranglehold on that power: connecting.
Connection means community, means sharing resources, means collaborating on solutions and just day-to-day survival, means choosing abundance over scarcity, love over fear. Connection is not exclusive of pain or grief, but inclusive of it. Requires it. Shared grief is powerful. Shared grief can and does lead to collective action to fight the thing that caused such enormous grief in the first place.
That is what I believe, anyway. And I believe it because we’ve seen it, time and again, throughout history and right now, here in the present. I have to hold onto that, and remember that, especially when I feel deep grief and pain, I must not retreat inwards, but reach out instead. And that means I must also be prepared to be a safe place for someone else in pain to reach out to. Not to hide from others’ grief, but to make space for it and, in fact, draw strength from our sharing.
None of this solves or stops wars or disasters on its own, of course. I don’t mean to seem as though I have solutions to all the world’s ills (no one person does). But I do sincerely believe that openly acknowledging and holding space for our private and shared pain–pain that comes from deep love–is a prerequisite to cultivating the beloved community that builds a better world for all.
Thanks for letting me share a little bit about Denis with you. If there’s someone you’d like a little space to remember aloud, feel free to leave a note in the comments. I’d love to meet your people who’ve moved on.
“Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.” - Toni Morrison
Now Read This.
“In Appalachia, Hell hath no fury like a trans goth with a banjo” [them]
…the real work of these videos, Clover tells me, is to showcase the power of Appalachian women and Appalachian music. There is a power in putting herself into spaces, musical and otherwise, that have been traditionally dominated by white cisgender men. Price explains that Clover’s audiences include “people who are interested in the answers to big questions” about identity and belonging in Appalachia. “Whether they are interested because they are queer or marginalized,” they are able to find a home in Clover’s weird marriage of the traditional and the alternative.
“How to Fight Misinformation, Part V: Resilience Targeting” [Brooke Binkowski for Truth or Fiction]
A specific type of hybrid threats is called resilience targeting, which involves purposely interfering with the ability of individuals, communities, or even entire countries, to recover after a catastrophe (whether it’s due to natural disasters or disinformation campaigns). Resilience targeting can dismantle communities overnight, proving it to be an extraordinarily robust yet cost-effective weapon that is difficult to combat.
“The Atlantic did me dirty” [Carrie M. Santo-Thomas at Teaching & Learning]
My experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. Luckily, we are living through a literary renaissance. Publishers are flourishing amid a profusion of stories, books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom. There is no shortage of engaging texts that students can and will read cover-to-cover. But if we insist that quality literature must come from old dead white men, we are consigning ourselves to irrelevance before we even begin.
“Conspiracies thrive in a crisis” [Drilled]
In much the same way that Martin Luther King famously described nice white liberals as being a bigger problem than outright racists, on climate sometimes it's the moderate pragmatists, or the progressives with a justice blind spot, who are as much or more of a problem than the oil CEOs. We know what the oil executives will do, we know what they want, we know what they are trying to do and their attempts to pretend otherwise are so hollow as to be laughable. More dangerous are the wealthy environmentalists who also happen to be market zealots that believe so fervently that corporations will behave rationally and ethically that they give them everything they need to behave like murderous robots; the true believers who espouse "moderation" in the face of disaster, who lecture that "now is not the time" to talk about climate because there's always a pandemic or an election that's more important; who insist on a snail's pace despite the fact that we are 50 years behind schedule; who think it is reasonable and pragmatic to put fossil fuel CEOs in charge of the global response on climate; who get so caught up in what's politically feasible that they forget the basic laws of physics.
“I was rescued from Hurricane Helene by the military — and all I got was a lousy TikTok conspiracy” [Minda Honey for Reckon News]
…these legitimate concerns about the actions (or inaction) our government cannot be heard nor addressed, if they’re being drowned out by false claims and fictitious tales about manmade hurricanes to manipulate election results. Countless hours and actual resources are being squandered dismantling these rumors that could instead be used to tackle the real issues that face Americans. And I only grow more concerned about the squall of misinformation sweeping across social media as we get closer to Election Day.
On Palestine.
“Inside the State Department’s weapons pipeline to Israel” [ProPublica]
Leaked cables and emails show how the agency’s top officers dismissed internal evidence of Israelis misusing American-made bombs and worked around the clock to rush more out while the Gaza death toll mounted.
I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God?
“How Gaza’s future children will inherit the trauma of genocide” [atmos]
The survivors of the genocide are already suffering the consequences: grief, shattered families, starvation, chronic traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and more. Research from past humanitarian crises suggests that the health consequences could last the rest of their lives. And now, experts fear that the trauma of the genocide could be passed on to future generations of unborn Palestinians: on their psyche, health, and potentially even their epigenetics—the cellular processes that control how genes work without altering the DNA itself.
Take Action.
Twitter is dead. Come join me on Bluesky (and here’s why).
Got cash? Give to aid efforts in the southeast US, Gaza/West Bank, and Sudan.
Have you registered to vote yet? Made sure everyone you know is registered? For Wisconsin. For the US.
I ran/walked my first 5k on Sunday for GSAFE’s annual fundraiser and you can still donate via my page! GSAFE does excellent and absolutely vital work to support LGBTQ+ youth across the state of the Wisconsin. Donate any amount!
Final Frame.
Save the date! LINE is celebrating the release of our new EP, “The Making Room,” with a show on Saturday, November 16 at the Harmony Bar in Madison. We’ll be joined by Gentle Brontosaurus. Would love to see you there!
‘Til Next Time.
Hold each other close. Happy autumn! Free Palestine.
