30: Anticipatory grief

It's dumb and I don't want to learn anything from this

Mar 28, 2020

Dreaming of Walking near Fuji, Isoda Koryusai, 1770-73

I have this running note where I jot down ideas for this thing during the week and I looked at it today and it is basically that Always Sunny meme with Charlie and the cigarette in front of the conspiracy wall, except it’s me trying to keep up with the news and my reactions, and what I think I should be writing about these days.

Actually, that’s kind of how the news overall feels right now, this frantic grasping for lessons and meaning, every single possible take and angle being explored, everyone having to become a public health reporter. That is not to say that all of these takes are bad or unnecessary, it is our job after all, but it makes for a dizzying experience. It’s like I was saying before about how I’ve become a machine that creates analogies, and it also reminds me of this part from William Gibson’s post-9/11 novel Pattern Recognition.

For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

So I thought I might try taking a little time out from the spinning of the given moment’s scenarios and instead just talk a little about feelings.

So buckle up or just skip to the links if you want, but one of the reasons I started this newsletter was because I wanted to have an outlet that could be very emotionally honest, something that’s not always easy to do in journalism. I figured that would mostly be about expressing anger, but this week the dominant emotion is definitely grief.

I struggle to write about being sad, because well, I am a cisgender man and that is just not our societal default setting. I also have a hard time with it because I am highly aware of and grateful for how fortunate I am. I’m healthy, so far I only personally know a couple of people who have symptoms of Covid-19, and nobody who has it seriously. My work continues, my home is secure. It feels crass to talk about having a hard time as a white, middle-class man who could have it way worse, and who benefits from the systems that are making it so much harder on other people.

But I know that in my own activism and writing about social justice, I feel a tendency to want to be this stoic, stiff-upper-lipped ally, when what’s really needed is full engagement, intellectual and emotional. In mainstream climate change discourse, in particular, the dominance of white male voices, often scientists trying to stick to their data, has cultivated a sterile, emotionless tone that many feel has held back the cause.

One of the strongest voices on this topic is Mary Annaïse Heglar, who recently wrote an essay for the New Republic about how, while the comparison has its limitations, her grief in response to the pandemic is remarkably similar to her grief about climate change.

This is painful. It’s supposed to be. We are suffering through a collective trauma. We’re watching our world change, and it feels like it’s falling apart. That’s not supposed to feel OK: It’s not OK.
…
I believe that we have it in us to face the great unknown that’s on the other side of this collective trauma. But only if we allow ourselves to mourn our losses—be they temporary or permanent.

There’s a tendency in activism or in media or whatever where we want to respond to a threat with a corrective—to fix things, or find lessons, to make things better next time. To form a strategy and an action plan. That’s an important part of the response, but as Heglar points out, the grief first must be felt for what it is. Any therapist will tell you it can’t be bypassed.

I tend to bristle when people give advice like let yourself feel the grief because it usually comes during times when we are already experiencing a lot of grief so it’s like yeah no shit I don’t have much choice you know. But this kind of grief we are going through now is different, in that it’s not easy to even recognize it as such. That’s because there may be no apparent personal loss that we would normally associate with the grieving process.

But the healthiest and safest among us are watching important parts of our lives and worlds crumble around us, with little way of stopping it, fighting it, or even knowing for certain how temporary or permanent it’s going to be. We’re not supposed to go this long without physically interacting with other people. We’ve lost basic joys like picnics and meeting friends at bars and cafes, watching people play music. We’ve lost our favorite places, in some cases maybe for good.

One of the saddest things I’ve read was how the virus is hitting Portland, a city where I lived for 5 or 6 years in my 20s, that’s defined by its social and cultural assets. Powell’s Books, the heart of the city, has shut its doors and is fighting to survive. McMenamins, a local chain that repurposes old spaces into bars, restaurants, music venues, and theaters, laid off 3,000 workers. I can’t even count the number of people I know who have worked at those places. Portland, like all cities, will recover with enough time, but it feels like watching a place, as I have known and loved it, suffer a slow death.

Then there’s the sadness of others’ sadness. Seeing people I love on the brink of losing their livelihoods, running out of money to pay longtime staff, watching their life savings dwindle. Talking to friends in the health care field who are devastated and scared and lacking the basic resources they need to do their jobs. We all have people we love who are vulnerable to illness, and can’t come close to them to offer help.

There’s also the hovering sadness of what’s to come, a feeling in our bones that things are about to get massively worse. David Kessler, who co-wrote On Grief and Grieving with the famous five stages of loss, described this as “anticipatory grief.”

Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it.

For me, this shows up as a persistent feeling of worry, but also an almost physical weight that grows throughout the day. I do alright, but it gets heavy. We all cope however we can, but for whatever reason I don’t find much solace in the singalongs, the baking, the kitchen dancing, the modern fables of animals reclaiming cities. I drink my coffee, work, read, listen to music, joke around, go for walks, drink some drinks, and on it goes as things unfold.

I do want to be careful not to suggest that there isn’t fighting to be done, or that we just need to ball up and cry for the foreseeable future. There are many enraging human and systemic injustices that are worsening this crisis, and there are things we can all do to confront them and to protect each other. We’re going to have to tear some things down and build some new things before it’s done.

But there’s also something about this that sets it apart from other struggles, in that many of the tools and weapons we normally turn to can only do so much, or they’ve been blunted. On some core level, the reality of death by illness is blameless and without lesson. There’s no reward to be found in the struggle against that reality. It’s just something really bad that’s happening to everyone.

There’s a song by Mount Eerie that is about Phil Elverum losing his wife to cancer and it’s pretty much the saddest song I’ve ever heard but also one I think about a lot.

It opens

Death is real
Someone's there and then they're not
And it's not for singing about
It's not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb

It closes

It's dumb
And I don't want to learn anything from this
I love you

Listening

Run the Jewels released a couple new songs and I love this one. Quite different from Mount Eerie but also serves as a balm in its own way. I think we’re going to have some good quarantine releases let’s get that new Fiona to drop am I right.

Watching

Castlevania, Season 3. This is an animated series by Warren Ellis who is one of my favorite comic book writers but I guess he’s also a TV writer and a novelist, and the show seems to be doing quite well it’s getting a fourth season. The third season steers away from the Dracula hunter tropes of the video games and first two seasons and gets into a lot of bizarre world building and mind-bending fantasy-horror with a final two episodes that basically had me staring at the screen with my mouth open for about an hour. It’s also pretty funny.

This is you when you are waiting for this newsletter to arrive.

I Endorse

Wearing comfortable pants all the time. I recommend light material hiking or travel pants, athletic pants, even chinos with a little stretch to them. Or go full sweatpants if that’s where you’re at.

When you work from home, especially as a freelancer, you have to build this skill of balancing when to be hard on yourself and when to be easy on yourself. You are your own boss and your own employee at the same time. I get the feeling a lot of people are struggling with finding this balance right now, which is manifesting in online debates over what you should wear on Zoom meetings, whether you have to iron, dress nice, put on a bra, etc, if you’re not even going outside.

Someone I follow on social media was commenting about how it’s a weird time because in one way it’s the most stressful period in any of our lives, but in another way it’s oddly calm. Individual situations are clearly very different, for example, health care workers are essentially working in wartime conditions. But for most people, and all of us in some respects, the riot of modern life has quieted.

As much as possible, I think we should err on the side of going easy on ourselves and use the stillness as a kind of shelter. Let the abnormality break our normal state of obsessive productivity or barely managed burnout. Be easy on yourself. Wear comfortable pants.

Here’s another song for you to listen to.

That’s the Palace for today. Not a very funny one this week! I know it was a little different than most, maybe it was a bummer, maybe it helped. I hope it was the latter. Don’t worry, we’re doing OK here overall.

Hey, everyone should do one of those video call parties, not with me sorry, but you know with your own friends. I did one this week and it was surprisingly fun and rewarding. My friend’s kid was in the background and saw it was me so he said this funny rhyme I taught him once about diarrhea. There is so much beauty in this world.

Tate

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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