This is such an excellent article. It’s my belief that we’re all impacted by the trauma of great losses, whether we’re consciously grieving or stuffing our experiences away with distractions, denials, numbing, turning away, closing down, fear, addictions, or angry projections.
The suffering and losses are all around us and, because we are all connected, are flowing through us or getting stuck and lodged just below the surface of our being. This is certainly true of this global pandemic. And it’s true of our warming planet, the sixth major extinction we’re in the midst of, and all the ways that the climate crisis is impacting life on Earth.
And then there are the endless wars, millions who are homeless and hungry, and all the ways that the suffering from the coronavirus, climate disruption, war and greed, and the patriarchal neoliberal predatory capitalist system and its ideology of domination intersects and impacts us all — and often especially the most vulnerable and impoverished among us.
And, again and again, I return to how it is that we are all connected, all related, all family. The suffering and the joy of others is also mine. And how we meet these great losses and our individual and collective suffering matters, and matters deeply. Our denial of grief keeps us stuck in the places we’ve shut our hearts down. It’s only through consciously allowing our hearts to break open again and again that we remember what we have forgotten — our deep interrelatedness with all of life, and the intimate relationship between joy and sorrow — and that we’re empowered to continuously heal and open and create more space for love.
And above all else, these times ask of us to love. Grief is but one essential gateway into loving more deeply and being propelled into taking a stand again and again in protection and love of all life.
Mourning is needed. May our sorrow cleanse and deepen and move us to evolve and expand. We’re all sacred. We all matter. ― Molly
Americans collectively honor ‘warriors,’ but that doesn’t extend to coronavirus casualties.
By
Over the course of a week, as the national death toll from covid-19 marched steadily toward 90,000, President Trump returned repeatedly to the idea that America is at war with the coronavirus. At a mask factory in Arizona on May 5, an event honoring nurses the next day in the Oval Office and a wreath-laying at the National World War II Memorial two days later, he said that Americans should think of ourselves as “warriors,” because “we can’t keep our country closed down for years,” and that, as we have in the past, we would “triumph.” The idea is to encourage us to collective effort and common sacrifice, to exhort us to put country ahead of ourselves and our conveniences, to stay strong in the face of psychic and physical pain, isolation, fear and loss. And, of course, go to work, shop and dine out for the greater good, knowing that it may mean sacrificing our lives or loved ones. That’s what it means now to be a warrior.
But if we are all warriors, why aren’t the currently more than 86,000 American pandemic dead treated as patriots and honored for their sacrifices? The metaphor appears to stop at death’s door. Our war dead are buried in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Our pandemic dead are more likely to end up in the anonymous ground of Hart Island in New York, a sort of potter’s field where it has long been considered a dishonor for a soldier to lie. It is a fate the national cemetery system was designed to avoid.
In fact, there is a conspicuous absence of any collective mourning at all. The reason is as simple as it is terrible: We share no understanding of these staggering losses as ours, as belonging to all Americans, as national.
Americans have a common set of expectations and rituals for responding to national losses, whether they’re from war, terrorism, school shootings, natural disasters or assassinations. We lower flags to half-staff. We hold candlelight vigils. We leave flowers, stuffed animals and messages of sympathy at sites that have witnessed horrors. We pause for moments of silence. We speak the names of the dead. We observe funereal pageantry from sidewalks, on television and online. We build memorials. This public repertoire includes a range of official and more organic responses; it is sometimes declarative and often ambient. It is always productive — of emotions, communities and common causes.
The pandemic dead have received almost none of this, and the omission is significant — even if the dying is still just beginning. Shared grief brings people together like little else. In the absence of the common bonds of kinship, place, language, faith or heritage, national identity is forged in ritual and the sense of shared experience among strangers, the vast majority of whom will never know one another. It is made of feeling and remembering together. The English poet Laurie Lee put it this way in “Lying in State,” about the public memorializing of Winston Churchill at his death: “Every resounding event seems to be followed by silence as history catches its breath. So it is this morning in this great bare hall — a silence like a fall of snow, holding the city and the world in a moment of profound reflection, reducing all men to a levelled pause.”
One of the best examples of this “levelled pause” came in a headline in Le Monde on Sept. 12, 2001: “Nous sommes tous Américains” — “We are all Americans.” Just thinking about it brings a lump to the throat. It is as perfect as it is devastating, not least because we know what comes after. We know the coalitions, wars and further terrorism these feelings will also fuel. The line between patriotism and nationalism is a thin one, and collective mourning feeds both.
But in the case of the pandemic, even Americans apparently are not “all Americans,” or rather some are less recognized in national kinship. The covid-19 dead are disproportionately urban, people of color, immigrants, the undocumented, the incarcerated, the elderly in nursing homes and state care facilities, the poor, the uninsured, the chronically ill, service workers and delivery people.
Judith Butler, in her book “Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence,” writes that “the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed, an icon for national self-recognition.” This means “we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building.” There have been obituaries for some of the covid-19 dead, it’s true, but the one big national “obituary” is missing. Butler was writing about the absence of obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, but her words could as easily apply to the pandemic about which Trump has said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” For there to be an obituary, Butler wrote, “there would have had to have been a life, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition.”
Please continue this article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/national-mourning-coronavirus/2020/05/15/b47fc670-9577-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html
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