We experience Grief is may different circumstances, not just when someone we love dies. We grieve divorces, end of friendships, moving for jobs, losing retirement accounts and incomes, losing our health insurance, when the image of something we believe in suddenly changes in vast and unsuspected ways. Many of us are grieving our image and belief in our country. It is frightening and upsetting. We struggle when we have challenging emotions rolling around together: Grief, Fear, Disbelief, Worry, etc. They may be too much for us to sort out and clearly understand. Instead of understanding we are left with a sense of discomfort that we cannot quite name and a sense of foreboding we cannot shake.
Many of us are feeling this way now. Regardless of how you voted or of the rhetoric you chose to believe in during the campaign season, the shocking and sudden changes in American policies have many of us experiencing discomfort, dis-ease and Grief all at the same time.
Grief usually does not show up alone. When we are caught fully unprepared for Grief or when Grief simply surprises us, it does not leave us at our best. The Grief many of us are experiencing now is also attended by shame, disbelief, fear and a sense that someone has pulled the rug out from underneath us.
The principles upon which our country was founded are either being ignored or they are being made unlawful. Yet, how can a country founded, built and grown by immigrants suddenly say, “No more immigrants from these and these countries?.” How can a country that use to pull the best and brightest from academia, science, medicine, etc. from all over the world continue to the best now? Our own families are full of stories of immigrants and the many reasons they came here for a better or new life. Even my father’s side of the family that has been here for almost 400 years still tells the story of the first ancestors who arrived.
Do not be fooled by your own heart. Yes, it is full of many feelings at once and that makes our emotional state difficult to understand. But, if we take the time to untangle the feelings we are experiencing now we find Grief is one of the more powerful, just behind Fear. What do we gain from acknowledging this Grief? We remember that the force of the Grief we feel is usually proportionate to the Love we felt If we are grieving the many things our country has lost in so short a time we must admit how much we loved and we proud of those parts of our country. Once we admit and own the Love we have or had, the Grief is understandable and once we understand the source of our Grief then we are able to do something about it.
The most painful part of losing someone we love is that final and ultimate separation. Not so with the Grief we feel for the America we are losing. Because in this single situation we can actually work to recover what we have lost. And, if we can recover what we have lost, then Grief will no longer be included in our feelings.
That is a rare opportunity - to regain what we have lost. While we admit and express our Grief and what else we feel now, remember that, unlike other times of Grief, this can be different. Once we no longer need our Grief we can erase it by working to change our country back to what it was. We can work together to return what we have lost and let our Grief go. In fact, in this one and only situation we need to set our Grief aside and be fueled by the other feelings we now have; the Fear, Anger, Shock, Embarrassment, and the rest.
May we all have the strength and the will to do the work to return to our country the things we never want to be without; a healthy environment, an immigration policy that allows the best and brightest to be here along with the refugees, a culture that respects diversity of religions, ethnicities, and more. The power to do so is within our grasp and what we cannot grasp right now, we can change the next time we vote. What we achieved for the first time, we can reclaim.
Blessings on all of our heads in the work before us. It is what we need and what we CAN do.