Through This Grief We Can Be Stronger Together
A lot of us are struggling to figure out how to express what we are feeling. It is nothing quite like we have ever experienced before.
We try to make a connection between the Bush elections, but in reality, it is barely comparable.
I think I’m pretty good at putting emotions into written word via metaphor and analogy. Today, though, nothing quite fits.
I’ve heard some people say it feels like someone has died. But that’s not quite right. When someone dies, the feeling might be similar, but they do not get more dead.
But it is grief.
I’m sure of that. One thing the last 18 months has taught me is that grief comes in a million different forms. It does not always have to be death.
I am reminded of the time I spent in the hospital with severe preeclampsia. Things were bad and I knew they would get worse. But I did not know when, or by how much.
I was grieving the loss of what could have been and accutely fearful for the future. I was grieving the loss of my expectations and plans. I had an idea in my head of how things were going to go. I never thought I was going to get the perfect birth experience, but I didn’t think it would be like that.
My analogy falls apart there because at the end of my trauma I got Rowan. What are we, as a country, going to get at the end of ours?
Not only are we mourning the fact that half the country voted in a way that seems incomprehensible, we are having to realign our visions of the future. We had visions of the first female president. In our heads, we were writing the history books that our grandchildren would read. Now we are mentally rewriting them, and we don’t like what we see.
We have lost a lot in the last 24 hours. I think many of us have shed some naivete.
And we are absofuckinglutely grieving.
Not the death of a person, but the death of what we envisioned our country would look like when we woke up this morning.
It’s going to take some time. I think a lot of us are alternating between kinetic energy to get shit fixed *now* and flailing despair that it is irreparable.
We cannot fix this today. Today we mourn. Tomorrow we start laying the foundation of the future brick by frustratingly tedious brick.
It is going to be backbreaking and heavy. No single one of us can do it all. Luckily, we’re #strongertogether
