Grief and Loss in the End Times

Many people express fairly regularly that they want some sort of return to normal. Many others, regretfully and gently, try to tell them that a return to normal is not possible. Maybe we could have done a full reverse somewhere in 2020, if we buckled down on the fascism and kept COVID policies in place. Perhaps somewhere in the years after that we could have kept turning the pages so at least society remained intact. Maybe, just maybe, we could have forged our way back if Harris won the election (I largely think her position on Palestine makes this only a wish). Unfortunately, normal as we once knew it is no longer attainable.

We were abandoned by the people we voted in to represent us. Biden let things slip. They forced us to accept that he was running again, listened to us eventually when we railed against it, and then put someone in who would run the exact campaign he was in the name of status quo and legacy. The impending dictatorship, the shadow of the Death Star over us, did nothing to make them act with any sort of urgency in the name of, well, us. The dems who are still sitting are somehow angrier at us than the figurehead king and his puppeteer. Go figure.

I have a more hopeful article in the making, but it requires a bit of reading that I sparsely have the time for. I actually think I’m going to finally make the trek to my local library soon, so I have wider access to materials for it. In the meantime I want to touch on something that I don’t see written about often. In the tidal waves of warnings of what’s to come, I never see anything definitively written about the loss we are going to experience.

War upends life and that is the path we are on. We’ve aligned ourselves with Russia very publicly. Europe, Canada, and Mexico are meeting without us to do threat assessment and fortify their military response, should it become necessary. Many of us are already feeling a sense of loss. COVID has taken over one million lives in the United States, and if it hasn’t taken life it’s changed it. The immunocompromised were the first to feel the isolationism of being left behind by society, but our forward motion away from COVID is catching up. The anti-vax rhetoric it solidified led to cases of TB and measles in the states. Long COVID is silently taking hold. Bird flu is incredibly close to making the jump to human -human transmission. I can’t enter a building without the thundering chorus of mysterious coughing. That changes life, too.

Disease aside, a large aside, there’s much more loss on the horizon that I think people are less prepared for. Especially the people who sit cozy in their homes, their heads warm in sifting sand full of the comfort that whatever’s coming, it hasn’t reached them yet. But it will. Whatever Musk and his teenage army are up to, they have our information. They will use the cops and the national guard and the proud boys, of all people, to enforce whatever insanity they have in store. The ground underneath our feet is shifting. Whether you’re desperately holding on or you’re letting the house crumble because you’re busy fortifying your preparedness strategy, the breakdown of society is real and happening.

Camps for immigrants are only a starting point. They’re using the frenzy of their base to scapegoat transgender people. They’re cutting them from sports, they’re changing their passports, they’re enacting travel bans so we no longer allow trans individuals into the country. Trans people are no longer allowed in the military. They’re firing LGBTQ+ NSA workers and calling them sex criminals and pedophiles. They’re rewriting not only LGBTQ+ history, but any history they can get their hands on that disagrees with the narrative they want the world (and us) to believe.

Friends you’ve known for a lifetime are going to become more secretive or go into hiding or be taken by the state. People are going to start joining movements that authoritarianism will eventually push underground. Laws and climate will change and people who stayed in the same place their whole life will be forced to move. Some of us will lose our homes, our things, some people will lose their minds. I spend long hours looking around at the little life I‘ve just barely begun to build and I wonder if getting a storage unit wouldn’t be prudent, if only to have somewhere to rapidly move material things (assuming there’s time for that). My money, which wasn’t spent on frivolity often before, goes to preparedness almost entirely now. Every conversation I have is about the horrors, and when they’re not they quickly return to the topic.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t find joy where we can get it, but I also want to drive home that in the things we need to be ready for, loss is one of them. We have to learn to make space for it alongside everything else we’re doing, or it will crumble us. Much of what fascist regimes do is try to break the will of its people so they are not able to fight back. Loss is a tactic. They will trample our grief and they will laugh at it, and that makes it even more important for us to be able to acknowledge it. To wear memory and love over our armor, to remember that that’s one of the tools we can use to fight because it is something they can’t fathom. We have to plant flowers on the battlefields they’re making and honestly, make our loss their problem.

Art is as much a combat tool as any, especially up against a narcissist army, should you choose to express it that way. You are entitled to your grief, to lounge in it like warm sunlight on your skin that only you can feel. Let it strengthen you rather than dishearten. Let it make you angry before it makes you scared. They have no right to take the things they’re taking, and how we feel about it is something they can’t take at all.

So, we will lose things. We’ll be made differently in the aftermath. We’ll learn who we are in a crisis. We’ll learn who we might have been during those harrowing times in history, and that, my dear readers, will be entirely up to us.

Thank you for reading. Below I’ve included a poem I love from a Michigan based anarchist and feminist writer, Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) that feels particularly relevant today.

AF

“The Burial of My Past Self”

Poor Heart, so weary with thy bitter grief! So thou art dead at last, silent and chill! The longed for death -dart came to thy relief, And there thou lies, Heart, forever still.
Dead eyes, pain -pressed beneath their black -fringed pall! Dead cheeks, dark -furrowed with so many tears! So thou art passed far, far beyond recall, And all thy hopes are past, and all thy fears.
Thy lips are closed at length in the longed peace!
Pale lips! so long they have thy woe repressed,
They seem even now when life has run its lease
All dumbly pitiful in their mournful rest.
And now I lay thee in thy silent tomb, Printing thy brow with one last solemn kiss; Laying upon thee one fair lily bloom, A symbol of thy rest;- oh, rest is bliss.
No, Heart, I would not call thee back again; No, no; too much of suffering hast thou known; But yet, but yet, it was not all in vain - Thy unseen tears, thy solitary moan!
For out of sorrow joy comes uppermost; Where breaks the thunder soon the sky smiles blue; A better love replaces what is lost, And phantom sunlight pales before the true!
The seed must burst before the germ unfolds,
The stars must fade before the morning wakes;
Down in her depths the mine the diamond holds; A new heart pulses when the old heart breaks
And now, Humanity, I turn to you; I consecrate my service to the world! Perish the old love, welcome to the new - Broad as the space -aisles where the stars are whirled!