If it is Grief You Feel, that is Normal
Seeing your country fall to authoritarianism is an indescribable agony but I will try
The words of two writers have been swirling around in my head a lot over the past week.
The first is Joan Didion. From her essay, “Why I Write,” she wrote: “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” To be fair, I think about this a lot, not just this last week; writing for me is often almost a compulsive need to wrestle an unruly or inchoate thought to the mat. Just as often, it is also to add a layer of solidness to a feral, unnameable feeling. Once I get things sorted out better through writing, the thoughts and the feelings are free to just exist as they are, but they have been metabolized. The amorphousness of what has gnawed at me gets new clarity and definition; the sharp edges become blunted quite a bit in the process of writing.
The second quote is from C.S. Lewis, and his thoughts on loss after the death of his wife in A Grief Observed, which I recently read. He started his journal of this time so plaintively: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.” He had never grieved before in this particular way and he learned that grief is more layered than just a feeling of sadness or even despair. For Lewis, mourning the wife to whom he had been married only a few years later in life, the grief, raw and dull, was far more complex and rippled with unexpected emotions and somatic responses than he would have expected had he never met and lost Joy Davidman.
These specific words from these magical writers are swirling because lately I have been in that place of needing to even loosely affix an understanding to thoughts and settle into what feels like a new emotional landscape for me. The feeling, if I can sum it up succinctly, is one of my chest cavity being carved out, that kind of loss. As Paul Simon, yet another artist who has helped me in this process of naming, cataloguing and understanding, wrote so simply and sang so tenderly in his iconic song, “Graceland,” “...And she said, ‘Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everyone sees you’re blown apart. Everyone sees the wind blow.’”
This is what it is. Of course. This is why the dugout sensation I have feels so vast.
It is losing love. It is grieving the loss of my country and it is like nothing I have ever experienced before.
Do you know those days after someone significant in your life has died? There is the immediate shock, disbelief and deep grief but in the days and weeks after the worst of that tangle of emotions has been unraveled, you may have found yourself existing in a kind of fugue state, almost like sleepwalking. You are here, for all intents and purposes, but you’re also not here. Most aspects of daily life feel like they are on a kind of delay, everything seems to be set in a blurry distance. Your body moves slowly and sluggishly, as if submerged under water, and it moves like your mind isn’t connected to it, like it is independent of you, as you know you, moving through life as if on muscle memory alone or getting signals from an operator outside yourself. Your body may ache for no particular reason. This was how it felt after my father died of a heart attack at 59. We weren’t close, in fact, we famously (at least within my family) did not get along at all, but that feeling of a wandering ghost settled inside me once the vapors of shock and grief lifted.
Given what is happening in the United States under Trump 2.0, it is understandable that among the emotions I feel, the lingering one is the effect of having my chest blown out with a rootless ghostly feeling replacing it. This is analogous with my father’s death more than 25 years and probably why it feels so distinctly familiar but distant. I wasn’t under any illusions about this country and its history, but seeing it stumbling in its death throes is of course experienced as a loss, an end, and, personally, a grief. Even if I was never a blindly loyal patriot to this country, just as I was never a staunchly dutiful daughter to my father, the collapse brings a complicated, heavy and pervasive feeling of loss. It’s not guttural, it’s in my chest, and it feels like a grey, ghostly cloud, weighted down with unexpressed rain, is just sitting there, pressing on my chest, getting heavier.
A week ago today, for the first time in my decades as an activist, I was sprayed with tear gas. It wasn’t personal. Dozens of us were and the nature of tear gas is that it’s diffuse.
On September 26 at the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, masked, armed agents in full combat gear would occasionally and seemingly for no particular reason walk out from behind the gates that surround the building and shoot tear gas, pepper balls and flash-bangs at those of us exercising our First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of assembly to protest the Trump regime’s racial profiling and lack of due process as they terrorize human beings. There are activists there around the clock but the big weekly protest is Friday mornings before work, from 7:00 - 9:00 AM.
Over the weekend, too, I saw footage of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, walking en masse militaristically and in full tactical gear through downtown Chicago, abducting at least one family with two children from Millennium Park. My beautiful city is under siege. A picture of the girl clutching her doll, her face in anguish, her father’s arm protectively around her, the mother looking resigned, holding her baby, and armed, masked agents around them: How can you see this, how can you know this, and not feel part of your heart blow away?
Every day, there are stories like this now, too many to keep track of, and this is just near me. Stories of parents abducted from their car on their child’s birthday, their young daughter crying in fear and trauma. Of keys left in the ignition of a car in the parking lot of a big box store, the family disappeared, and neither ICE nor the entity responsible for the parking lot clear on who was responsible for handling the abandoned vehicle and its keys. Of journalists in their cars having chemical munitions intentionally tossed into the open windows of their vehicles by ICE agents, coating the windshield with a noxious residue and choking them with inside poisons. Of citizen activists blowing on their whistles and using bullhorns to alert entire blocks to not leave their homes or open their doors, ICE is in the neighborhood.
As I am writing this on a Tuesday morning, Trump has just told 800 assembled generals and top brass to treat blue cities like military training grounds. He is encouraging the use of violent force against U.S. cities and citizens. I would not be surprised if by the time I publish this, live ammo against protestors has entered the picture.
I don’t know about you, but I am already nostalgic for the time when armed militias were not roaming our streets.
I am sure that next week will bring fresh horrors that will make what we experienced this last week with the tightening yoke of authoritarianism seem like child’s play in retrospect. We may look wistfully back at when they just shot tear gas canisters at us. If there is one thing I have learned from this regime, especially the second time around, life under Trump doesn’t stay at one level of bad for very long: It continually worsens and squeezes harder and finds new ways to inflict pain and remove joy. Escalation is their primary tool, fear is their currency and cruelty is the objective.
Grief can feel like a deep well of sadness. Grief can feel like anger beyond what is rational. Grief can feel like the relief of numbness. Grief can feel like the wishes you make when you are at your most desperate, like the kind of envy that drives someone to commit crimes. Grief can feel like your heart being replaced with a void. Grief can make you feel like you have a ghost inside you. It can feel like all these internal weather systems are colliding.
My country is not dead but it is on the ropes. It is on life-support. I am watching it be killed in real time. I am among millions in this country fighting to save it, though, and I will not stop. But right now, I am also grieving. The United States is not a human being, of course, but it is made of human beings and the collapse of it is personally felt and the grief, though complicated, is as painful as any loss I have experienced.
I will keep fighting, we will keep fighting, but the grief is real.
I’m grieving with you.
Saw Chris Hayes’ coverage last night and was aghast (linking to it in case other readers need to see it. I know you don’t need to see more, Marla. https://youtu.be/vOXOWAhFz0A?)