the vocation of sadness
meeting the grief at the end of the world
Dear friend,
I don’t remember how to talk with people.
”I’m sad,” I blurt. “about everything.” Usually it’s OK. This is how things are now.
I’m supposed to be alright. I’ve long believed I would not age in the same world where I have spent my first 30 years. But now I’m finding I don’t have a place in either of the worlds. Or, well, before, I was a prophet of doom, and the lady whose house you went to that time. The gatherer. Haver of many chairs.
But I never predicted a doom with no gatherings. Now I am slackjawed and lonely, and becoming weirder by the minute here among my chairs.
The litany of “everything” about which I’m sad doesn’t bear repeating, not even, it feels, as a prayer. But it’s not only that so much bad exists.
It’s also that I always expected Hard Times could be met and equalled with fortitude and great love. But those have not yet helped, it seems. The Hard Times keep getting harder but my faith in myself, or in humanity, has not grown apace. Only my grief for us has. I’m at the stage of exhausted rawness where I cry at
- spilled anything
- my dog being nice to me
- songs that unexpectedly mention God
- when other people blurt that they are sad
- rain, because it’s a good time to cry; unless the sun is also shining while it’s raining, and then I cry because I don’t like that
I confessed to a friend I don’t know my place in all this. “Irregular bringer of casseroles to neighbors” and “attempted participant in uprising with deeply unclear marching orders” are not obviously important roles like doctor, mother, grocery clerk, Taylor Swift. It would be easier to live with grief and even real hopelessness if I also knew my actions in the year 2020 mattered to other people’s daily lives.
My friend told me my work is helping people, because she is kind and also is not losing her grip on reality like me.
But the moment I said I don’t know my place, another voice also asked me if grieving is not a very particular and sacred place. If choosing to wake up, look square at all of it, and let my heart break again today is not a vocation. If sobbing over another sink of dishes about Kate’s father and the Louisiana coast and more martyred protestors and the coldness by which it all feels surrounded, all at once, is not the prayer I have been without strength to pray. If it would not be a comfort to some doctor or mother somewhere to know I am lighting candles for her at odd hours, and holding a space for her in the great sadness she may not have the capacity to encounter herself.
In my hopelessness I will continue to send money places and show up, where requested, with a mask and a helping hand or a raised fist. And tears. I am a firm believer in the impossibility of changing the world absent the tiny actions of ordinary people—or, on even less hopeful days, I’m still a believer in the great heroism of the brave musicians soothing the sinking Titanic passengers.
More importantly, I’m a believer that this is not the end. In this moment when that’s all that can really be said for the situation, maybe I am—maybe most of us are—living an apprenticeship in the art of remaining present to the grief at the end of the world. We are becoming people who can stand, day after day, in ever more dusty rubble and simply hold each other’s sorrow. Even if haltingly and imperfectly, we are choosing the way of the witness to enormous, swirling loss and pain, surrendering that enormous attention, energy, and tears they rightfully demand. To refuse grief for too long when she knocks is to leave unobserved our most ancient ritual for stubbornly declaring those losses and pains matter. Instead, we are noticing and marking both the stinging, exquisitely specific griefs of ourselves and our closest friends, and the looming, amorphous sadness of great disaster and great evil.
It feels like too much. It is, in fact, too much. After decades—centuries—of too much violence, too much greed, too much inequity and injustice—we are watching great pieces of the world they built groan and collapse. No one prepped the area for all this demolition.
If there is hope to be found it is neither that those pieces can be regained nor that they will stop falling—and we, stop grieving—anytime soon.
If there is hope to be found it is that we will tell our grandchildren how the twenties were the decade when everything changed, and that we changed it with great fortitude and great love—
in part because we learned to honor the work of witnessing and mourning, bringing casseroles and then going home to meet our own heartbreak over another sink of dirty dishes, with great fortitude and great love.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey