Dear Family: Lament

Dear Family:

In one of my favorite Instagram accounts that I follow, the creator who goes by @mainandvine talks today about real and deep grief being a rational response to the passage of the horrific bill that I refuse to call by its more common name. She talks about the stages of grief first named by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, among other things. (You can listen to her here: )

I don’t know how you all are feeling, but this rings true to me. In my spiritual direction work, the folks I have spoken with the in the past two weeks or so, in particular, have ALL had grief as something of a through-line lately. The water table is high, as Tristan once said about me in a particularly poignant season of my life, and tears come easily.

One thing this commentator didn’t mention, though, is that there has been recognized a sixth classic stage of grief, reflected on at length by David Kessler: specifically, the stage of meaning-making. I’m not there yet myself ~ that takes time ~ but I am pondering it a bit. When will we know what this all means? I mean, not what the short-term effects will be, but how we will make sense of it and move forward from it to something new and healing?

Yeah, yeah … I’m wired towards hope, it’s true, but as I said, I’m not there yet. At the moment I’m feeling a biblical sense of lament coming on. More than lament! Sort of a dismembering; I’m all out of joint in the way grief can do that. You know, like Psalm 69:

1 

Save me, O God,

    for the waters have come up to my neck.

2 

I sink in deep mire,

    where there is no foothold;

I have come into deep waters,

    and the flood sweeps over me.

3 

I am weary with my crying;

    my throat is parched.

My eyes grow dim

    with waiting for my God.

The grief I feel is about the horrors we know are happening: ICE raids being conducted with no accountability, the silencing of media and of educational institutions, the absolute disregard for freedom of speech, political assassinations, disappearances, rampant anti-semitism, Islamophobia, anti-trans and -queer violence, misogyny, and ugliness, and the folding of a spineless Congress and Supreme Court failing to protect the whole checks-and-balances house of cards … gosh, and that’s only the beginning. The grief is also about the death of ideals. Yes, I know that the US never truly lived the freedoms and equality that are touted every July 4, but the way that has all crashed down around us in truly spectacular fashion is heartbreaking. I grieve, too, for the future, and for our children who carry such painful cynicism and lack of hope as a result of everything they’ve seen in these past two decades or so.

And so, like many of you, I am grieving. I’m steeping in lament. It’s not a fun place to be, frankly, but it’s undeniable.

Someday, I suspect, I want to move towards hope, or at least towards meaning. And someday ~ maybe even someday soon ~ I will remember courage and persistence. I will remember that I am rooted and grounded in revolutionary love. And in remembering, I will be re-membered. I will be put back together, and re-rooted. May it be so ~ for you and for me.

And until then … lament is the order of the day.

Sending you peace and love,

Susie