This is a grief that will not heal
How are you, we ask each other, after a hug of greeting. We stumble to answer. Our smiles are sad. Everything’s fine, we say, except…everything.
We are the luckiest women in the world. We are in our late middle age, our early old age. Serious aging has given us a shove or two but is keeping its distance for now. We know who we are and who we love. We are healthy and full of energy. We are safe. We have clean water and plentiful food. We have more autonomy than women have had in any culture or any period of history, though even here and now we must still fight for full human rights. We are deeply involved in our work, whether in our professions or the activities that we’ve chosen as the need or opportunity for money-earning has receded. Our grown children are magnificent. And, prize of all prizes, many of us have grandchildren, those small beings who have entered our lives like a flock of miracles, bringing love and delight beyond imagining.
How are you? We are well, thank you, and the family is thriving. And yet—can we say it? can you hear it?--our hearts are shattering, we wonder if we can go on, we wonder how one survives a time like this. We look back at the Nazi era, an episode of horror that came to an end, but what was it like to be in its midst, not knowing if this nightmare was now a permanent reality? Or in countless other attenuated tragedies where life in every aspect is changed and tainted. Can joy and hope remain alive in Aleppo? In the South Sudan? In Yemen? In Gaza?
Here in the US we are battered by a ceaseless avalanche of hatred, scandal, corruption, contemptible behavior, cruelty, lies, greed, willful ignorance, the unashamed resurrection of the very ugliest of human nature—all led and modeled by the most powerful person in the world, our president, and his conscienceless enablers. We live in a state of taut, painful anxiety and follow the news compulsively—this will bring it to an end at last. No? All right then, this surely must bring it to an end. We cry. We stand on the corner with our signs and chant our resolve. We gather in huge numbers in the centers of power and feel, fleetingly, our own power of solidarity and righteousness.
Our days are busy. We work, create, connect, look after our grandchildren, throw ourselves into what’s most pressing in our communities—speak up for the immigrant father snatched by ICE, swarm our representatives’ offices to insist on better voting access, expose the sneak strategy to build a new fossil-fueled power plant. After our packed days we fall into bed, exhausted. At 4 in the morning the haunting begins. We lie with eyes open to the dark. How did this happen? How much worse will it get? What can we do that we’re not doing? How is it possible that millions of people in the US—a third of the population—embrace this toxic and deadly dangerous regime? How can our own sweet neighbors, who chat warmly with us on the street, who we know are not bad people, how can they be part of that monstrous contingent?
And looming above all other concerns, the one that brings us to our knees in a fight with despair, is the mothership of terrors: the knowledge that climate change is hurtling us towards a world of misery and chaos never before been experienced by humankind. We ourselves will be gone before the worst of it descends. We ourselves may not have to endure the fires and floods and droughts and famines and extinctions and the drowning of the cities and a billion displaced people and the authoritarianism and wars that will result. But it is no consolation. Our beloved children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—all the children, ours or not--have no choice but to walk forward into what may be hell. It is their future. It is the future that we have unwittingly bequeathed them. And our unsheathed hearts walk forward with them.
We walk the streets with the baby asleep on our chest, her tiny face upturned, eyelashes flat on satin cheeks. It is the purest joy.
But there is an insistent whisper: What will this child, adored beyond measure, experience thirty years from now? Sixty years from now?
And we cannot bear it. We simply cannot bear it.
When others look to us for reassurance we remind them of the wisdom of Rebecca Solnit, who points out in Hope in the Dark the simple truth that no one knows with certainty what will happen, because it hasn’t happened yet. And that space of not-knowing is the locus of hope and action. They are comforted, those people who seek hope, by this incontrovertible point. It hasn’t happened yet! By definition, then, it is not inevitable.
To ourselves, Rebecca’s mantra no longer brings comfort. The body of knowledge is too vast, too many brilliant researchers have spelled out in relentless detail what led us to this point and what lies ahead.
And yet she is right. There are still choices, still surprises. There is Greta Thunberg with her long braids and her words like arrows. There is Extinction Rebellion. Parliaments declaring a state of emergency.
If we do all we can, if all of us do all we can, if all of us to do all we can every day, never resting, never giving up, perhaps we can compel our corrupt and myopic leadership to take steps that will save our children from at least the very worst of the bad futures that are possible.
Other sorrows arise and threaten to end all joy: the loss of a beloved person, or one’s health. The shine goes out of everything, as William Maxwell says of his mother’s death when he was a child[1]. But it comes back, eventually, even if the grief continues to blindside us from time to time.
Time will not heal this world-grief. There is only endurance, and tenderness, and solidarity. How are you, we ask each other, knowing what we are asking. The hesitation, the slight shake of the head, the sad half-smile—we understand. “Everything’s fine. Except…”
We nod slowly. “Yes.” Our eyes hold each other, saying what cannot be said.
Jo Salas is a writer and activist in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York.
[1] William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow. New York: Vintage, 1980
