On Needing Grief
I’ve been laying on the ground a lot recently. I’ll move from my desk chair to the floor and type from my stomach, feeling the firmness of the wood, cushioned by carpet, beneath me. I’ll pause and fold my arms, one over the other, and put my forehead into my forearm. I’ll lay on my back in a form of surrender, corpse pose, the final resting posture. I’m on my stomach right now, the tenderness of my organs pressing into the ground, my spine and skeleton arched upward as I type, my ankles crossed. My heart rate is elevated. I feel my pulse in my wrists. My hands are shaky. My emotional focus is narrow. Anger is in the top back of my throat. Sadness burns in a sharp point at the front of my eyes.
This morning was a rainy, dim morning. I felt a rainy, dim mourning, too. Yesterday, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a high school student shot and killed nineteen children and two teachers with a rifle. He purchased the weapon legally after his eighteenth birthday. Two Saturdays ago, a white supremacist opened fire in a Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo, New York, murdering ten people.
Today was parent visit day for my daughter Sophie’s class. She held an umbrella over her head as we walked through the parking lot and crossed Division Street together. Her school sits just off I-90/94 in Chicago, drawing kids from all over the city. After crossing four lanes of traffic, we walked beside her golden brick school building, passing the large blue and yellow ribbons decorating the school’s fences and trees along the way. Once indoors and upstairs, we took off our rain boots and put them next to each other below Sophie’s cubby. We then spent an hour together in her classroom, a beehive of activity as parents hovered around their children observing, encouraging, and complimenting their work.
I’m sure any morning in your kid’s elementary school classroom would feel special because any peek behind the curtain into their world is magic. But today. Today it felt suspended in time. At one end of the classroom there is a set of bells mounted on stands in pairs from Middle C to High C. Throughout the morning, various students would use a mallet to ring a bell or two, the extended sound reverberating through the air. Students counted, drew the continents of the world onto maps, and said, “excuse me,” while navigating the classroom, tight with so many extra bodies. My mind somehow felt present and calm the entire time, comfortable in my role as an observer, watching my child move around her classroom with a sense of ease and confidence. Before I left, we snapped a selfie, Sophie and my eyes beaming, together, her safe in my lap, at school. As I was leaving, I stopped to admire student-made artwork in the hallway. My eyes lingered as I read “Black Lives Matter,” “Stop the Hate!” and “Practice Makes Progress.” Then I walked back out onto Division Street, back to my car, and went grocery shopping.
I pushed my cart in a fog, a tornado of grief violently swirling within, as I reached for spaghetti noodles and Cheerios. Learning and food procurement: these should be safe activities. The past two weeks have horrifically shown otherwise.
When it was time to be back at school, I parked in the first available spot and took a beat of silence in the car before stepping out onto the sidewalk for pickup. As I approached the large, wood door where students wait, Sophie’s eyes locked with mine. “My mom’s here!” she announced, standing up from her place on the steps and gathering her backpack and beloved stuffed dog, Woof Woof, while clutching a wax paper bag of freshly made biscuits. She had on her denim baseball cap with the white letter “S” protecting her face from the (nonexistent) sun.
“Why did you park so far away?” Sophie wanted to know, when I pointed out where our car was. There was a large open space right in front of us. “When I parked, this whole area was full with other cars, love. That was the first spot available.” One other mom stood waiting. She turned around and smiled at me, commenting how there’s always a steady line of questioning about why we do what we do. “They’re quick to see solutions, though,” I replied, smiling faintly, and then adding, “and, Lord knows, we need some solutions…” My voice trailed off. The mother’s eyes met mine. “I can’t even talk about it. I’ll start crying,” she said, her voice sincere. Her eyes looked tired and had the raw pinkness of recent tears. “I can’t either,” I managed.
Sophie and I walked towards our car. We put her backpack and Woof Woof in the front seat before I scooped her up to carry her around the car, using my body to shield hers from traffic. We worked together on the buckles of her carseat. She wanted to eat her biscuit right away. There were two parts that had fused together in the oven. She said the bigger part was for her and the smaller part was for her little sister, Noa. I kissed her forehead, brushing wavy strands of honey blond hair away from her eyes. I kissed her forehead again. As we drove home, I replayed the interaction with the other mother, feeling grateful for our fleeting moment of shared sadness. I noticed my longing for connection that acknowledged grief.
Doesn’t it seem like we don’t know how to grieve? In my experience as a white person in America, white people struggle with collective grief. We want a rainbow. A smiling photograph. A snazzy “Before and After” reveal. A bow. In my experience, this is what we call hope: the rainbows, the smiles, the afters, the bows. More and more the weight within me says we’re missing the point and that the missing of the point has such grave consequences.
I want us to practice collective grieving. Holding each other. Feeling. Breaking. Rebuilding. We may do it in our own lives, but do we do it as a group? As a society? We each have our own individual process of grief, yes, but I crave spaces where we can practice opening up and letting each other into our messy grief. That is the hope I want, that in this mess we can let ourselves unravel, shed denial, look squarely at what is, and become something new.
