grief and the current events
currently: mourning the world we used to know and the world we could've had
Hi. I hope you’re doing well. At least, I hope you’re doing as well as you’re able, given the current events.
I don’t know whether my apparent urge to start writing again is a longer term comeback or a momentary blip that has arisen out of sheer necessity, but I don’t really care about that right now. As a matter of fact, it’s rather difficult to care about much right now, and after a couple of days of living through this feeling, I’ve realized that what I’m experiencing right now is grief. Perhaps you are too.
My first adult experience with loss was when my uncle died in late 2014. He’d been very sick for a very long time, and we all knew it was coming eventually. Of course, that doesn’t make the loss of someone any easier. I vividly remember how out of sorts my world felt in the few days following his death. For a short while, it was as if I existed outside of time. The days were a blur. Christmas was one of them. I recall one evening in particular, after my uncle’s funeral, I was sitting on the couch with my dad in comfortable silence when it occurred to me how little mattered. Nothing I had to do felt even remotely important anymore. All that mattered was the person we lost, taken from the world too soon. I broke our silence to bring that up, and as it turns out, he felt the same. To this day, I’ve never felt more understood than I did in that moment. That wouldn’t be the last time I experienced loss, but the grief has never since felt so profound as it did that time. However, what I’ve been feeling these past few days has felt eerily similar to those incongruous December days.
Fast forward to November 2016. I’d just moved to Portland, Oregon after casting my absentee ballot for the woman many of us hoped (and assumed) would be our first female president. On election day, it was as if the whole city was humming with excitement and anticipation of what we thought would be an obvious, easy victory against a man who leveraged hate to mobilize his supporters. Of course, that turned out not to be the case. I’ll never forget how bleak the morning of November 9th felt. It felt like half the world fell silent, gripped with the shock of what happened and the uncertainty of what the next four years would bring. Little did we know, it would end up far worse that we could’ve ever imagined with the pandemic and the orange administration’s bungled response to it. When he lost his reelection campaign, I never imagined we’d ever again experience anything like that Wednesday morning in November.
Alas, here we are eight years later. And somehow, it feels worse than it did then. Maybe it’s because we’ve done this already. Maybe it’s because we thought that after the world came to a halt in 2020, after everything we knew fell apart before our eyes (for better or for worse), and after we somehow managed to pick up the pieces and arrange them into what feels like an uncanny imitation of Before, we would’ve learned something. That we knew better. Apparently, we haven’t and we don’t. I’m not going to wax poetic about what this means for us going forward, because I don’t know. I don’t think any of us can possibly know, and it’ll mean different things for different people. But in these past few days, I’ve returned to that strange place that exists outside of time. I call that place grief.
The word ‘grief’ doesn’t feel big enough to carry the weight of everything that grief is. It transcends time. It ebbs and flows. It can feel subtle, like wading through calm, waist-deep waters. It can feel overwhelming, like being carried out to sea by a rip current. It can be cold, unforgiving, unbearable, terrifying, confusing, and every other unpleasant feeling you could possibly imagine. But most of all, grief demands to be experienced, and the only way out is through.
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Notes on Grief”
Anyway, as I said, I don’t know whether I’ll continue writing on here after this. I hope I do. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.
Until next time (I hope),
Hannah