There should be a place we can go, a hallowed place, where we go to grieve. There ought to be circles of people who love and care for us as we vent, cry, moan. There ought to be succor and warm baths to wrap us like wombs to gestate our grief. We could be there for a day, for a week, for as long as we needed so we could feel it and be handled warmly.
Instead, in a death driven settler state, grief is extracted and exploited, as everything else humans experience. Our joy is a reason to shop, our sorrow a reason to consume indiscriminately, and our numbing is a way to be “productive.” Human experiences that cannot be exploited are a detour, distraction, or bottleneck. Laying down to cry for a day isn’t useful to the empire. But you know what is? Fear of mortality. The sadness of loss. 9/11 was someone’s battle cry, while 2,966 communities, friend groups, and families still carry the weight. In the current american hellscape, the weekly reported deaths due to covid creep closer to that same number. Bleak ain’t the word for it. And we do not have any social conventions to honor or hold the experiences we have. We ought to. There ought to be.
Our society builds monuments and crafts remembrances of all kinds: holidays, statues, t-shirts, spectacular funeral ceremonies. What’s missing is observance of the everyday grief, the quotidian sorrows of this very inhumane human condition. You “don’t get” to be hurt by displacement from your home, your loss of a major friendship is just another thing to stack atop the doom pile of emotional work you never learned to do. Of course, we all get along as best we can. Muddling through, we hope we don’t hurt anyone with our hurt. But that isn’t mourning. It isn’t grieving, now is it? Where is the expression of lament? Where is the opportunity to witness ourselves and others, to be acknowledged and held up by folks? This isn’t a trick question; we all know the answer. We have to make these practices, we have to survive these griefs together. Not because of some magical rainbow story. Not because “god is love,” and this is a purportedly Christian nation. But because grief is individual as much as it is universal. Universal as in all of us. The bird of paradise on your lawn, the intrusive bug you crush underfoot. Loss is the cycle in which we live. That’s just a fact.
Loss is part of living.
In deep love and sorrow, we move. We sit with those fallen by the wayside. We do not regard time as linear anymore, because emotions are time travel. We are present to loss and dwell in the experience as long as needed. This isn’t a grand political gesture. It is a praxis of care in the depths of loss, so we can cycle back to birth and creation. We do not stay in one place even in grief.
Loss is part of living. We bless the names of those gone, we bless those coming forth. We move. We move. We move.