I've been trying to write here for a week. Two weeks. I carry a journal with me everywhere and keep scrawling bits and pieces. Last week I wanted to write about fear, and anger, and grief. And then I didn't post, and then another mass shooting happened, and then it just all seemed pointless. Here we go again.
I just keep writing the same things, over and over again. I'm so tired. I'm so angry. I'm so tired of being angry.
Last week during warm-ups before Suzannah's soccer game, I walked around and around the track at the middle school where they were playing. The fine drizzle hadn't yet settled into the steady rain that would drench us by the end of the game, and I needed to move. Otherwise I would have scrolled restlessly and angrily through my phone, unable to pick up the novel I had tucked inside my purse. The world just feels so terrible. I wanted to be hopeful before election week, but in 2016 Donald Trump was elected president and since then --
I keep trying but I don't even know how to finish that sentence.
I went to church last week, on All Saints Sunday where we honor our dead. In faith, I will settle for nothing less than life. My pastor's own mother died last week, and she delivered a sermon on All Saints Sunday, and I can't imagine having to speak about that with the weight of such grief. We grieve and we honor the lives of those we love. We also grieve and struggle with the mass shootings that have become incredibly ordinary. In our America, a student shot and killed another student and classes resumed later that day. A man shot a couple in a Kroger after a failed attempt to enter a church. A man killed two women in a yoga studio. Another man killed eleven people and wounded several more in the Tree of Life Synagogue. Another week in our America, where toxic white men -- the most dangerous kind in America -- terrorize, and our administration fuels their rage.
I tried to write about all of that and then another man opened fire in a bar and killed a dozen people and wounded several more. One of those killed survived the shooting in Las Vegas, and does anyone find it sort of insane that these shootings are beginning to overlap? But within half a day it was halfway down the page on the news. When Columbine happened, the country seemed to stop; now we barely blink. All those people dead, not even two weeks after the mass shooting at Tree of Life, and how many mass shootings have we seen this year? Remember when I was going to blog only after they happened? I'm way behind. I'd have a couple hundred entries right now. I try to make up for it in some small way by donating money, but I'm finding it pretty tough to write (who will read this tired old rage anymore?) and even more difficult to pray.
My faith is pretty shaky these days.
These were thoughts on my mind as I drove to church last week while my son chattered in the backseat and my daughter sulked because apparently we did not explicitly tell her about Daylight Savings Time and therefore we deprived her of an extra hour of sleep, which I do not even understand because this child wakes on her own at some absurd hour every morning. (I'm not kidding. Never once in her entire life have I had to wake her up. Not when we had to rise at four in the morning for an early flight to Omaha. Not once to get ready for school, which for her starts at 7:00 because she is in jazz band.) The big picture was weighing on my heart quite a bit, all wrapped up in the small one, the picture of my senselessly privileged life that I happen to love quite a lot. It has been a difficult month, a difficult fall. I'm still recovering from one of the most intense experiences I've had as an educator -- our MYP 5-year Evaluation was brutal in ways I didn't anticipate, and it feels deeply personal. I understand it's not really personal, because it's so much bigger than me and it's also not about me, but it feels that way at times, since I've poured so much of my energy into this program that I love and believe in, and now I have to sit and wait for weeks (or more) for the team's findings, upon which everything that happens next depends, and our Matters to Be Addressed do feel like things I should have been able to better prepare for, even when they're matters out of my control. And it's still not the big picture, or the most important thing, but right now everything feels tangled together: passion and love and grief and anger and fear. I've felt all of those things, every day, for two months. Really ever since the morning my grandmother died, the same morning I stood in front of the staffs from three schools, three hours after I learned of my grandmother's death, to try to prepare for this visit, this thing I've told them all is not by any means a final exam but which, I confess, still feels like one to me.
The personal and the political, the public and the private, and the weight of it all. The lines between them blur.
*
On All Saints Sunday at my church, the names of the dead are read aloud, and a bell sounds for each one. I experienced this for the first time ten years ago, two months after my grandpa died. I submitted his name but wasn't prepared for the absolutely shattering love and grief I felt when I heard someone else speak his name. Charlie Griffith. It was beautiful, and sad. Six years ago I listened to the bell sound for my niece, Bailey Rae, the name of someone who was born and should have lived but didn't. Last week, I listened for three names: Jay Hoger, Matt's uncle and my children's great-uncle. Sean Mach, the husband of one of my oldest friends. Esther Griffith, great-grandmother of my children. My grandmother. The one who called me her "precious" for my whole entire life, right up until the last time I hugged her in July, the month before she died.
Jay and Sean both died from cancer and it absolutely disrupted the natural order of the universe. These men should still be here to raise their children and love their grandchildren.
My grandmother made no secret of her readiness to die, even before my grandfather did ten years ago. I don't know how to make sense of any of this.
My feelings towards my grandmother were complicated. She loved me fiercely and unconditionally. I have also felt, since I was in college, since the days that I called her in my loneliness at the 800-number she and my grandpa bought just so I could call them whenever I wanted, that I would have disappointed them as much as I made them proud. At my grandpa's funeral ten years ago, one of his friends told me just how much he'd talked about me, and I cried about that for a long time. I know he loved me. And I know my grandmother loved me. But I'd also known since I was in college that I believed very different things than they did.
"You really think that?" my grandma asked me, when I told her about a paper I was writing. "You really, really do?"
I really, really did. And I still do. The "what" doesn't matter, really, does it? But that's the moment when I wondered, for the first time, whether love really was unconditional.
And all these years later, I'm still trying to reconcile that.
I've spent the past nineteen years preparing for both of my grandparents' deaths, in a sense, ever since my grandfather smoked his last cigarette. I was also utterly unprepared for the ways in which their losses would drive me to my knees. Their fingerprints are all over my life and my heart. I know they loved me. I loved them. And I have no idea how we would navigate this world together if they were still here.
*
We've had nearly as many mass shootings as there are days in 2018. That is not the natural order of things, but we treat it as such, and that makes me absolutely sick with rage. Last Sunday I wondered how long it would take to ring a bell for the names of those who have died from gun violence in our country. Opinions differ on what counts as a mass shooting, but the fact is that thousands of people have died when they should not have died. How long would it take to read 12,000 names?
*
It has been six years since Sandy Hook -- the span of the life of all those murdered first graders. My own daughter was in first grade that year, and I still cannot read a complete account of that day. I cannot. All those children should be in middle school, carrying instrument cases and telling terrible jokes and breaking out for the first time and using deodorant and slamming their bedroom doors and rolling their eyes at everything their parents say while still crawling onto the couch with them for a surprising snuggle at the end of a tough day. But they were murdered in their own classroom, and we did absolutely nothing. Now my children practice active shooter drills in their schools because we consider shootings as inevitable as anything else. I am not the first nor the last person to lose all hope because of that: when twenty first-graders can be murdered before they live to learn multiplication, when we prove that we love guns more than children, there is just not much hope to be had. And it just keeps happening, because our country only pretends to value life.
The same thing. I keep writing the same thing. And I am trying to write about too many things.
The same tired rage. Here we fucking go again.
The personal and the political. The public and the private. The blurred boundaries between them.
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