Facing (bodying) the fragility of life

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boston, death, emotion, giving a voice, grief, pain, trauma, TraumaTuesday, vulnerability

Today I returned to my other job after two weeks away, and discovered that one of my coworkers – a gentle, pleasant soul I did not know well after a month and change at the company, but whom I’d decided I liked – had died over the weekend. He was climbing with friends near a waterfall in the White Mountains, and fell 40 feet. He was 29 years old.

It is hard to know what to do in the face of such shocking news. I came into work this morning and one of my supervisors took me aside to tell me about it, which he did, sensitively and quietly, as I have observed to be his way. I noticed that he hadn’t shaved today. When he said the name, I had trouble placing it; I am still learning everyone in the office. But a brief description made it clear, and I found myself struck by a strange and nonspecific sadness, nearly the same feeling as I’d had after the Sandy Hook shootings: a shock and slowness and weight of grief over sudden death that could have been prevented, but that isn’t that close. And in this case, the strange regret – guilt? – that I never got to know him well, that now I never will. I’ve been near tears several times today, but never all the way to breaking. Some part of me seems to say, What right do you have?

The office is subdued, though the QA team still chats about random geekery, the engineers still play video games at lunch. One coworker with whom I work closely has tired eyes this morning, and is the second unshaven face I see. The stoic and kind manager who works at the desk behind me looks like he has been crying, and brings extra chocolate for the edge of his desk. He doesn’t quite make eye contact with me. We joke that there’s very little that dark chocolate sea salt caramels can’t fix, but the unspoken, more bitter than the chocolate, rings out.

Flowers arrive and fill my nose with a lilly smell I can’t abide, and his boss and I start a small shrine amid the team. Last night, before I came back, a few people went out for drinks, apparently until late, to raise a glass and remember. It is unclear what else we are supposed to do.

Move slowly, keep up the good work, and remember seems to be the answer so far. I want somehow to reach out, to let people know they can talk to me if they want, confidentially, that I’m trained for this. But like everyone else, I don’t know what’s appropriate. How do we listen to ourselves, to each other, after such a loss?

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Funerals for six-year-olds, or, moving some of that emotion through

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current-events, emotion, fear, grief, mental-health, miriam greenspan, news, sandy hook shootings

For all my compassion and concern for humanity and its state, oftentimes I find myself feeling closed off from larger events, the kind that get national attention: hurricanes, earthquakes, bombings in Gaza, shootings in Colorado.  The media bombard us with images, coverage, analysis, and repetition of all of the suffering, exploding, and ghastliness, and I don’t think it’s particularly healthy.  (Mr. Rogers had some very useful things to say about this, that don’t just apply to children.)  It’s an insanely difficult balance: how do you manage all of the collateral emotional damage from these events that are outside of your monkey sphere – those 150 or so people the human mind can manage to care about – and if you choose instead to close off from them, how do you keep from becoming hard?

Numbness, Miriam Greenspan wrote, never occurs selectively.  When we try to protect ourselves from one emotion, say, fear or grief, by becoming numb to it, we find ourselves numbed to all emotion.  During the later years of George W. Bush’s presidency, I shut myself off from a lot of news coverage, because after a while I felt like I couldn’t bear to participate in the national conversation anymore – it was too intense and depressing.  I’m not sure how much Greenspan’s idea extends to issues of scale: if you numb yourself to people you don’t know dying in a school shooting, are you cutting yourself off from experiencing more personal grief – not to mention joy, anger, love – all the things that make for a full life?

I don’t know.  What I do know is that I often feel guilty about not feeling more during national tragedies, or at least, for not doing more.  I sent some supplies to people in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, but then again, I’m from there, and the people asking for help were folks I went to high school with.  Sure, I’m pretty removed from them these days, and wasn’t even friends with them then, but I could connect for the moments it took to lend a bit of a hand, however minor.  But the tsunami in Indonesia?  The earthquake in Haiti?  Even Hurricane Katrina – which I felt so moved by in 2005 because I was at Burning Man at the time and the Temple was covered in memorials – I ended up doing practically nothing about.  I think I sent a few bucks to the Red Cross, when at first I was ready to drop everything and go volunteer.

Which brings me to the school shootings of Friday.  This was horrible, the whole world is talking about it, and it’s totally screwed up.  But on Friday, I couldn’t figure out how to feel.  Regarding it as something that happened to people I don’t know and trying not to think about it too much seemed callous, but engaging it fully and letting it fill me with grief seemed impotent – and a little disingenuous.  Why this tragedy, why this time?  Because it’s kids?  Because it’s close by, in New England?  Because it was so senseless?

Nevertheless, this morning I was driving to my therapist’s office, and BBC News, with their strangely touching accents, was covering the first funerals of a couple of six-year-old kids, kids whose lives senselessly ended on Friday.  And whether it was the grey day, the difficult issues I’m facing in therapy, the descriptions of the kids (one was “curious and wonderful”; another, “intelligent and mature for his age”), I broke into tears in traffic.  Whether or not it did anyone any good, whether or not I was showing compassion for strangers, raw emotion flowed through me, and afterwards, I felt a little better.

We live in a strange and confusing world.