When someone you love dies, you don't take it in all at once. You don't know immediately "this is how my life will be going forward." You feel your way a step at a time, in one moment forgetting and reaching for the phone to tell the person something that just happened and being struck again by the loss, but in another moment laughing and feeling that it's possible to go on.
It's an imperfect analogy, because this isn't one loss from which we now have time to heal. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are in a position to do continuing damage to this country, to tear us apart in ways we don't yet know. They can inflict loss after loss upon us. But as with a death, we can't take it in all at once. We can only keep putting one foot in front of the other, feeling our way through an altered landscape and trying to find—or create—a path to something better.
We must not look at Trump’s election and declare that the only possible explanation for how it could happen just happens to fit perfectly with what we thought all along. We should neither dwell too much on how it was someone else’s fault nor evade our own responsibility—if we win as a coalition, we have to lose as one, too. (That said, dammit, white people.) We should not try to empathize with racism, but we should understand Trump voters well enough to know where and how there are those who can be won over without compromising our values.
We can seek the bright spots. We can fight. We can revamp and rebuild. We will have to keep grieving, because terrible things will keep being done. But we also have to go on. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, seeking a path and fighting our way through to something better.