When will the grief end?

I was walking upstairs, about to get a workout in, when I saw a notification flash on my phone: mass shooting in Colorado. As I pulled up the story, I saw a familiar picture, a King Soopers down the road from my pre-pandemic office, and a mile from my old house. My breath stopped. As the information poured in over the next day, I waited anxiously to read the names of the victims, and the name of the perpetrator. To sit with not knowing. Would someone’s name pop up that I knew? A friend, a former partner, a current patient?

Although I avoided the livestream and other graphic images, my mind couldn’t resist walking itself through the store, the way my body had done so many times. When I read about the parking lot, I couldn’t help but see myself there, the shops surrounding it, the Indian restaurant I liked, the backcountry ski store that I frequented when my bindings were giving me trouble or I needed a new set of glove liners. The familiarity of it all was jarring. The grief of the community that I felt deeply connected to was palpable, even as I sat in my house alone in Denver.

In a season, in a year of such profound grief, we sit with our community and grieve again. So many more lives lost every day from the pandemic then from a single shooting, and yet the senselessness and utter lack of control of a mass shooting in a grocery store confuses me more. It’s one of the only places we’ve been able to frequent throughout this time. How do we come to terms with another layer of grief on top of what we are already processing?

I remember walking Scarf last March, smiling at other dog walkers from across the street as I listened to Michael Barbaro report on the horrors happening in Italy, trying to metabolize what I presumed was to come in the United States. I was grief stricken. My anxiety was buzzing. I felt that I might get Covid from the air, from crossing someone’s path, or touching anything at all that wasn’t sprayed down or safely secluded in my apartment.

My husband and I contemplated questions like–is it better to go out with gloves on, or just use a lot of hand sanitizer? We watched as the numbers grew, lives lost on a ticker tape.

By March of 2021, it feels much different. I don’t watch the numbers anymore. I go on living my life, without the trauma of the world and community front and center. We go on living and surviving, because we have to, and we choose to.

Desensitization is our friend, our protector, but what happens when it normalizes atrocities? I don’t want to feel numb when there is a shooting at my grocery store, in my community. I don’t want to say, nothing can be done, or it’s just another day in America. I don’t want the victim’s names to only be that.

When a best friend tells me her friend was in that store, was shot and killed, I want to sit with her, and feel her grief, and not push her away, not shut down that little voice in my head that says, it could have been me, or it could have been her. I want to still feel empathy.

I grieve the loss of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many unnamed victims. I feel a country reeling, outraged over our broken system. I am outraged too. But I know my pain is so minimal, and that it’s almost shallow to feel it now. That I should’ve been feeling it more, earlier.

I try to configure the right words. I see signs reading White Silence is Violence, and so I post and I speak even though I’m afraid I might say the wrong thing. I listen to the 1619 podcast, and read Caste and Homegoing and White Fragility and pick Ta-Nehisi Coates back up off the shelf. I read the Vanishing Half and Such a Fun Age, and I donate money and I post to Instagram and protest at rallies and I know it’s not enough. I know my grief doesn’t really matter, that it’s insignificant. 

As a Colorado community, and a United States community, and a world community, we are processing multiple collective traumas that will take time for us to heal. Numbing can be helpful in getting through a year like 2020, because if we sat with the true reality every day, we wouldn’t be able to go to work, to take care of the kids, or keep on going. And at the same time, finding a way to process the fear and loss we have experienced in this time is imperative.

One in three Americans lost someone they care about during this pandemic.  Think about that for a second. Thirty three percent of our fellow community members are experiencing grief on a deeply personal level. One hundred percent are experiencing grief on a collective level.

We grieve for the loss of what we knew before. Or what we didn’t know. We grieve for the loss of the freedom our lives had, the connection, the safety, the beauty of a time when we didn’t contemplate global pandemics.

We lost control and celebrations and rituals and togetherness. We lost seasons of holidays, and the ability to say goodbye in person to the ones we love. We lost the ability to have our family in the hospital room when our babies were born. We lost our income,  our houses and our businesses. We lost the safety of what we knew and felt before 2020.

And yet. I know I feel more gratitude for time spent with the ones I love. For health. For hope. For dialing in on what’s important and trying to keep focused on that. Let’s love each other. Let’s feel for each other. And also, let’s keep going.