I was talking to a friend yesterday who is dealing with being the caretaker for a mother who’s been diagnosed with a serious disorder. Her mother’s life is on a timeline and, in the way of such things, the time line is unknown. It could be sooner, could be later, it could be much later.
My friend is dealing with the stress of a mother who’s terrified of dying, and a father who is in shock, as well as her own feelings about being the person who is responsible for helping these people deal with their personal tragedies. She is also a loving daughter who is grieving what she knows she’s going to lose.
Meanwhile, I have other friends online mourning the death of a friend who took their own life out of fear of losing the fragile sense of security they had found under the ACA act — in short, because of the election of The Monster. That may seem preemptive only if you’ve never really been scared about how you’re going to survive the next winter; it may seem foolish only if you have no compassion in your heart.
There are the friends with children who have been bullied over the past week because other children, emboldened by the hate of their parents, think that it’s acceptable to physically attack anyone different from them. Yes, more than one parent — three, actually, who are grieving the loss of the safety they thought their children had at school.
I have talked with many people too scared or too traumatized to go home for the holidays, where they would have to face the people they thought loved and supported them but betrayed them utterly by voting for a monster who wants nothing more than to strip them of their civil rights. They are nearly hysterical in their grief over people who aren’t dead — their grief is for the loss of the relationships they thought they had.
And of course, I have friends dealing with generalized grief over the election. They fear for their themselves, their friends and family, their own children, but they are mostly mourning the death of their hope in the future.
Everyone I care about is looking into the abyss, right now. Walking on the edge of that of that abyss is something I’ve spent years doing, one way or another, and I feel like I should have good advice, I should be able to say something supportive, something kind. But I know damn good and well I have no training in these skills. I could only chat with them online or by email, or meet up with them if I can, to let them know that I hear their fears and that I least understand what they’re feeling and how overwhelming it is.
There is popular talk about wearing a black ribbon for grief — just a plain, straight ribbon torn in the tradition of rent clothing that so many faiths all over the world have to recognize the loss of a loved one.
But Hillary Clinton isn’t dead, and there are many who are arguing our dream of progress, the dream of a united, compassionate, forward-thinking America isn’t dead either.
But a lot of people feel like it is, and honestly, some people have always felt like it is. However we see it, as something new and tragic or something old and tragic, there is still this groundswell of grief and anger and fear (and if you think that anger and fear are not incredibly important components to grief then I wonder who you have not lost your life) and we are all in this together, somehow, in different ways.
I remember what I went through with my own losses, my own trauma, my own kind of disappeared twenties – actually, I disappeared between 25 and 35, a decade gone to dust. I spent a lot of time at the club dancing, trying not to dance over the edge into the abyss, or maybe trying to dance into it, maybe trying to find a way to be a part of it and to take it inside of me.
I think there’s always the hope that the abyss will eliminate your fears, but it won’t, because you don’t ever really fall into it; you always skirt it, and it haunts you, and you despair. I have no words of comfort for that. I feel like a failure because of that. I feel like a failure because I am a writer who has no words.
So I sit and I listen, and I hope we’re all in this together — those of us who are grieving personal losses, and those of us who are grieving the loss of hope.
Those of us who are grieving are all in this together, after all, for as has been pointed out before: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”