in the aftermath of more mass violence, how do we grieve?

Not again.

I’m sending you love and gratitude on this Monday morning after yet another mass shooting in America. These are difficult days in this country and around the world. It seems that every day we are confronted with another — often more than one — report of atrocity, violence, or hatred. We witness hostility in our own communities, both online and off. Somehow, we are expected to just keep going — go to work, go to school, keep appointments with friends, get together for beers, act like everything is normal.

Yet, many of us insist that this is not what we want our normal to look like. We don’t believe that violence should be normal. We don’t think we should be able to just pick up where we left off in our conversation when we hear the news that twenty-six people were shot at church. We believe something should come to a halt, there should be a moment or more of silence, we as a people should acknowledge the tragedy, acknowledge what it does to us as loving human beings  to live in a place where such actions are considered acceptable.

(Because, of course, if they were not acceptable, more would be done — both by those who are ostensibly in power and we the people — to undermine the conditions necessary for such violence. We would demand that our legislators make changes in our gun laws. We would rise up as a country seeking to keep our neighbors and children safe. We would shout down those who insist that automatic weapons are necessary safeguards for the average citizen. We would vote out of office any legislator who had refused to vote for even the most basic restrictions on gun access. We would insist that all men and boys in our country be taught, over and over again, how to deal with their anger and shame, how to grieve, that violence toward others doesn’t make them a man, that other men will no longer celebrate their “accomplishments” when they attack, brutalize, murder, harass, or otherwise violate the lives of others. It would be men who drove this struggle to change the definition of American masculinity, American manhood. It would be men who, so ashamed at what they’d become, would stand up and finally say, “No more. We don’t want to be this. We don’t want to do this to others. We are ready to stop.”

Just imagine if that were true.)

But as a country, as a people, we don’t make this kind of time for grieving or even deep acknowledgement of each tragedy anymore. There are so few moments of silence in the classroom or workplace. Newscasters are don’t break down as they read reports of children killed, folks of all ages and genders sexually-assaulted at work and at home, people of color murdered by police… they cannot break down. They have to keep it together, to report the next bit of terrible news.

So how do we take care of ourselves? How do we speak of what’s unspeakable? How do we create the space around ourselves and those we love to honor loss, to create room for horror and grief to move through our bodies, to take the time to even understand how we feel? How do we create the space to remove the armor we must wear just to walk out into the world (again, both online and off) and come home again relatively unscathed?

One of the ways I create this kind of space is to freewrite about it. I sit down in the dark morning hours, light a candle, open the notebook, and find room on the page for all that sorrow and rage and horror. I allow myself not to make sense, not to censor or edit as I write. I allow myself to be more vulnerable than my country seems to want me to be these days. I let the words fall out the mouth of my pen, messily or gently, and I do not judge — not my words, not my feelings. (This is the intention, anyway.)

If I am part of a community of writers, I can take the risk to write what I am feeling and struggling with and share it with the room, knowing that they will respond to my words, my creativity, and bear witness to what the words communicate with tenderness and gratitude.

See if you can give yourself ten minutes, even fifteen, to write however you are feeling, whatever you are thinking on this first Monday of November. What if you gave yourself that sort of time, to be more vulnerable, more real, more free? What if you held open room for those you love to do the same?

Thank you for your words today, and everyday.

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