The Day After the Day of Great Mourning

What a strange day it was. In many ways… in most ways, the anticipation of the day of the first anniversary of our daughter Nora’s death was far more impactful than the actual day itself. In the weeks leading up to the day, we struggled with the memories and wrestled with the response. And then we woke up on Saturday August 1, 2020.

We planned no grand gestures, choosing to have two of her teachers over for a physically distanced dinner in our garden — all while the lightest of rains fell on us. The hesitant sprinkle of water from the sky could represent a heavenly metaphor. But, really, it was more of an initial threat that turned into a welcome cooling. I guess the metaphor still lands.

And now we’re past this particular marker, waking up in a world in the grip of a lethal pandemic and a cultural and political awakening and coarsening. And she’s still gone forever.

For myself, the only way to make meaning is by practicing and acting, listening and challenging — walking into the world with wisdom unfixed. If I can maintain the health of my body and mind, I can maintain my focus to put other people’s lives and stories at the center. We have a once in a generation opportunity to create change that lifts everyone and not just the few who have used their inherited wealth to create a mosaic of laws and assumptions and institutions and messages that coalesce money and power into far fewer hands. Too many of us — myself included — have allowed this most obvious of lies to go on unchecked, unmasked.

Nora’s life, her strength and love in the face of this horrendous disease, her death — it has profoundly changed the thoughts and habits that had become routine to me.

Hannah Arendt wrote, “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” It’s as if we needed to take off the glasses so that we could finally see, never seeing the tint that had been laid into the glass.

I hate that this violence to my family has served to shake me into a new way of approaching the world, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the gift I’ve been given. And that’s it, really: if we can begin to accept that our suffering is a gift — just as our joy is — we can make something useful out of all of this ugly mess. And it starts with forgiveness.

Writing in her book “See No Stranger,” Valerie Kaur notes a conversation with her mother who is tending to her mother in law with tender love and devotion as she lay on her deathbed; a woman who, for much of her life, made her daughter in law’s life a miserable one. When Valarie asks how she could forgive her, her mom says, “Forgiveness is for you, not for the person who hurt you.”

Arendt says, “Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”

We must forgive ourselves before we forgive others. We have really hard, painful work to do. And we will not succeed if it’s us or them. It’s just us: fallible, imperfect humans who sometimes get sick and sometimes don’t; who are blinded by their privilege or inert within their generational trauma; who can barely make it out of bed some days or who light up the world simply by the fact of their day to day existence.

Nora is gone and I am here. We are here. This is the time to do the hard work.