undone

In the last few days—and, admittedly, plenty of days prior—I felt bad about my stomach. I’ve fretted over the brown spots on the sides of my face. I’ve considered and decided against and then fully reconsidered how to have my hair cut. I’ve looked at high waisted pants online and boatneck tops, both of which seem well suited to my shape.

I’ve also had briefer moments of existential dread as I realize that old age is an arm’s length away, or in thinking of both of my kids moving away. These are quick, lightning rounds of tension.

Along with this inward concern for my Self and my soon-to-be non-Self, I’ve also pondered the fate of a pittbull whose back leg was amputated last week and whose foster program I follow on social media. Per usual, I spent a lot of time in my backyard with my dog tossing tennis balls because she’s too scared to go on walks. This gives me a vantage point of the yard so that I can wonder when to take down the old dogwood against the back fence and whether cherries would do well there, and is there enough sun for pole beans, and which herbs do I want to grow this summer, and am I tall enough to wash the windows back here if I’m on the stepladder.

These are immediate, daily things that churn in my head. Sometimes they’re accompanied by questions I keep at bay but occasionally shuffle into the thought deck:. Can I afford to make a contribution to my Roth IRA? When should I go talk to my doctor about my blood pressure?

Then there’s work. Getting out a newsletter and a press release. Contacting contacts. Listing the things and checking the things off the list. Editing the site. The yada yada yada dance of the daily sifting and shifting of information from one place to the next.

But on Monday none of this mattered. On Monday, I was somewhat embarrassed by every single one of the above thoughts and was instead consumed by an emotional cocktail of fury and sorrow. On Monday, I learned about Ralph Yarl.

First, I saw the photo of him with his instrument case in one hand and his little brothers on either side of him. I saw another in which his head is tilted to one side and he’s wearing a smile that is somewhere between shy and self-effacing and loving toward the photo taker (his mom?) In the third photo, he’s sitting in the kind of band concert that I watched my own son perform in so many times.

I saw Ralph and wondered why do we do anything with our days other than figure out how to un-gun the U.S.,, how to turn off the conspiracy cycle, how to patch up holes of hate and fill them with something that comes from sense and decency.

How on earth? How the hell?

This afternoon, Andrew Lester shuffled up to a judge and said he was afraid for his life. He was terrified of a 140-pound kid who plays the clarinet. It sounds absurd, but I don’t doubt him. The programming of conspiracy, fear, and hate—cult-like and 24/7 in its insistence—mixed with an insane zeal for guns is what took aim at Ralph.

Meanwhile, we’re all supposed to keep going. The ads in my social media with images of bloated bellies are still appearing. Emails from the university about using the correct branding haven’t stopped. A bill came in today’s. mail and the garbage can still needed to be brought back up from the curb.

Don’t pause. Don’t lie in bed and weep. Keep going. This is normal.

A friend’s daughter who tried to express her concern to a person in power at her university about a recently uncovered mass shooting plan was gently told that it’s often best to get on with daily life and not spend too much time dwelling on the negative. This is what we’re all being told in so many words all of the time.

And yet don’t you want to spend days dwelling on Elijah McCain and Tyre Nichols and the children in Uvalde? (By the way, does that last word feel forever ago? It was May 25, 2022—not even a year.) Don’t you long to memorize their faces, and learn their favorite colors and their preferred birthday desserts? Don’t you want to stop every fucking time this happens and lay down and grieve? Properly. Not in some rushed fashion. But the kind of grief everyone deserves.

If Covid had any beauty it was its insistence that we all just stop. It insisted that we be with what makes us uncomfortable—including the pandemic, which we worked mightily to try to fix.

When we us allow ourselves to get quiet, we notice ghosts. All of the deaths that have happened out of gun violence and racial hatred, out of fear, and this us-them thinking. The deaths that have happened and also the ones yet to occur. The kid who tomorrow will be shot by a cop, and the one the day after that who will be shot by a stranger, and the other who will shoot himself in desperation. When we stop, the level of messed-upedness becomes harder to avoid.

We are sick. Without a doubt. How else do you explain that U.S. every-day people account for 393 million of the worldwide total of civilian held firearms—that’s 46%! And yet we make up just over 4% of the world’s population. There are 120 firearms for every 100 people in the U.S..

We are sick. Without a doubt.

And when you’re sick, you’re told to stop. To pause. To make space for the body to heal. To give time for medicine to take hold.

I don’t know exactly what the medicine is, but I think that we have to stop going-going-going blindly in the face of this. We need to insist: No, I am not working today, I am mourning. No, this is not normal. No, I am not crazy or overly sensitive. I am entirely sane and I am completely and utterly undone by a smile like Ralph’s..