The Land of Constant Mourning
We don’t even get the day off work to grieve.
In America, violence is the click track. In 1619, it counted us in. In 2022, it still does. I know it’s hard to hear with everything blaring so loudly.
There has almost never — not in my lifetime, and I assume not in yours — been a time when we weren’t at war. If not with the world, then with ourselves. In this country, we kill. The many who don’t decry the violence appear to cheer for it openly.
I don’t even need to tell you what I’m referencing, or go into detail carrying statistic after weighty statistic. Yet between the pandemic, climate change, state-sanctioned murder, domestic terrorism, declining life expectancy, forced birth, the opioid crisis, sky-high maternal death rates, and “garden-variety” gun violence, it’s hard not to shake the feeling that in America, death is our lingua franca. It’s our indoctrination. It’s how we tell our children to “grow up.” By traumatizing them … assuming they survive past recess.
Welcome to the land of constant mourning. We don’t even get the day off work to grieve. I woke up at 6 a.m., started editing at 7:30, and by 11:00 I was neck-deep in Slack messages. “How are you?” “Good! You?”
No … I am not good. We are not good. But alas, it’s just back to work. Nothing changes and nothing stops. The machine ticks on; the people suppress their inconvenient feelings. And it’s every day with this horseshit.
I cannot imagine having kids right now. I cannot imagine telling them what I know responsible, loving parents have to talk to them about. I cannot imagine adding an additional body to the count, or bringing life more into this world that this country can then cut short.
Nothing changes. Doesn’t seem to matter how loud, or sad, or angry we get. It doesn’t matter how broad the support is for progress. We watch a governor give a press conference. We lower the flags to half-mast. We hold a moment of silence. Yet all we do is wake up and log back into work. “How are you?” “Good!” Every morning. Every mourning.
We stuff our dread, grief, and rage way down into our core. It calcifies and it hardens us. We plaster smiles upon our faces and plaster band-aids over bullet wounds. We emit thoughts and prayers into the ether, yet no suffering in no country could ever feel so mindless or godless. We have everything we need to change except the will to do so.
Whether it’s a hurricane or an assault rifle, a lover blinded by rage or a white supremacist overflowing with hate. Death comes. Not with dignity, patience, grace, or support. No, in this country, what we do is kill. Those who do not kill are conscripted to death. The beats of hearts cease yet the click track beats on.
I don’t have great words for what I feel — what I imagine, on some level, we all feel. It never gets easier to articulate the deadening thud these headlines land with. I’m almost 40, yet I still don’t feel I’ve gotten better at surviving and enduring; death hurts the same pretty much every time. It hurts a lot.
It’s hazing, and a test of resolve — a form of variable torture that never relents even if it gives you a momentary reprieve. Because you know it’s coming. It’s always coming. In the meantime, we feel more undead than alive. In the meantime, nothing changes and nothing stops. We go to work. We drop our kids off at school. We pretend we are okay and that it’s going to be okay. It’s not okay. Nobody’s okay. Not the dead, not the living.
I don’t have solutions at the ready. Not here. I don’t know what to do to tear down an endless wall of death and the few ideas I do have aren’t worth mentioning now. That’s not what this place is for today. Today’s just about feeling. Today’s about mourning. Today’s about taking inventory of what we have, what (and who) we’ve lost, and how achingly far we’ve yet to go. Today’s about just enduring today, scarred by yesterday … and scared as hell at whatever fresh hell we’ll face tomorrow. You know it’s coming. It always does.
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