Grief as a Gift

by lauraslemonadestand

There’s this thing I do when tragedy happens: I focus on the details of how and why. It’s not out of morbid curiosity; I’m looking for a scrap of difference between myself and the victim(s)- a reassurance that the tragedy can’t happen to me.

I think I’m not the only one who does this. In the wake of my divorce, friends wanted—no, make that needed– to know certain things about how it had all gone down. They were listening for the ways that my marriage was different from their marriages. I now notice how this pointed curiosity appears around diagnoses of cancer and other dire illnesses. We just want to know that our unfortunate friend has at least one risk factor that we lack: maybe they used to smoke. Or they’re overly fond of cured meats. Or… there’s got to be something.

And here we are, reeling from the massacre at Sandy Hook. We are practically twitchy with collective hunger for a motive to be revealed. We need some scrap on which to hang the reassurance that such a thing can’t happen to our school, our community, our children. Or, that we can have enough information about enough salient matters to prevent another massacre. Eliminate violent video games. Or assault rifles. Or personality disorders. Right. Good luck with that.

We vow to improve school security, even while the detail emerges that Sandy Hook Elementary had strong security measures in place. We float the idea of arming teachers. Or students.

These are just the natural functions of our minds: we know how to codify information and apply it to our own preservation. So, when tragedies happen, we try to learn from them in order to prevent their recurrence.

But the fact is, we can never *know* enough to keep tragedy, illness, or senseless killings and deaths out of our lives completely.

The fact is, every one of us is visited at least once by at least one of these horrors.

The fact is, every one of us will someday meet our own ends, no matter how carefully we distinguish ourselves from the victims of other tragedies and misfortunes.

To those of us who can’t stop crying, who feel grief as if it were our own children who had been killed, I want to say: that’s because they are our own children. The tragedy happened to all of us. To you, and to me. We did not escape it, and there is no assemblage of details that will change the fact that it has already come to visit our very houses. It’s that understanding that I would want to see inform our collective conversation and our national and personal actions.

To believe otherwise is delusion. We are not separate from one another. When a child is killed, I should feel that pain. It’s right for us to grieve over Sandy Hook. When we cry, we are deepening our wisdom: the awareness that we are all connected.

I actually think that it is the delusion of separation that precipitates all violence. The murderer’s madness is his alienation from the feelings and humanity of his victims, whether he is an impenetrable loner or the collective consciousness of a society infected with genocidal mania.

Meanwhile, every time we allow empathy and connection to inform our choices, we prevent another Sandy Hook, uncountable millions of times.

Last night I went to the Holiday Concert at my children’s school. My son lip synced “Jingle Bell Rock” with little enthusiasm. My daughter pouted because I told her that ten is too young for mascara, no matter the occasion. But the concert felt sweeter than it otherwise would have, because I believed I was experiencing it on behalf of the moms and dads who won’t be enjoying any more squabbles or frustrations or bemusement over their children. Ever again.

I keep thinking about the Hindu creation myth of Indra’s net. In it, the god Indra weaves an infinite net and casts infinite jewels across the net’s infinite points of connection. The jewels themselves are faceted such that each one reflects all the others. The net is a spectacle of indescribable, interconnected beauty. The net is our universe. So. Let my tears and your tears be new jewels cast across its breadth.