More Candles for the People (My Neighbors This Time)

I'm still kind of numb after the massacre in Lewiston. Bewildered. I know there's grief in me, and I know it would be healing to feel it, but it's not moving. Thanks to those of you who are moving it.

I live in the midst of the manhunt, just a few towns away from Lewiston, Maine, where the hunted man killed 18 people with an assault rifle on Wednesday night. All the schools are closed. Everyone’s supposed to be sheltering in place. I did think it was a bit strange, driving to work yesterday before I learned we were supposed to stay home till the man is caught. On the walk from the parking garage to my office, I felt like a snail without a shell.

I guess the truth is I am always a snail without a shell. There is no shell. At any moment, I could be crushed by a foot that doesn’t know I’m there, or doesn’t care. But something about the proximity of this shooting, and the fact that the guy’s still out there, made me acutely aware of the ever-delicate balance in our society, how all it takes is just one of us to snap and shatter the mass illusion, our daily bread, that says everything is okay, or at least okay enough to continue on with the regularly scheduled programming.

Everything is not okay. It’s never been okay here in this thing we call America. Most of us know this, I think. We have our opinions about it, our explanations for it. But when it rears its head like this, invites you to know it a little deeper, a little closer, twenty miles away from the newlywed nest you’ve been building twig by twig with the love of your life, it tugs you suddenly out of your sleep, wakes you at midnight, compels you to open up your laptop to see if they caught him yet, and when you see the words GUNMAN STILL AT LARGE it makes your mind start turning again, and you can’t get back to sleep, so you sit down at 2am to write because what else can you do.

Feel, I suppose. You could feel. But feeling is a mystery. Even if you want to feel, are willing to feel, feeling can’t be forced. I don’t have a direct line to feeling right now. Right now, for me, it’s a vague uneasiness, a morbid fascination, a conceptual sorrow. I have not been graced, bodily, by the angels of anger or the gods of grief they herald. I have not done my fair share of the weeping. I don’t know why. It just hasn’t come for me yet.

I was in our mostly empty office yesterday morning for about an hour when a colleague came in and made a beeline for the room next to mine. I could hear her speaking with another colleague, and then I could hear the gods of grief come for her. It was the realest thing I’ve heard in our office to date. Those sounds of grief, they tug us closer to the truth. They agitate and activate, break us open, shake us awake. Shook me awake, at least.

Grief isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the beginning of the answer, an appropriate and necessary response to catastrophic loss and violation. In this time of cascading losses and violations, grief must become a way of life for us. We have to find ways to grieve as a matter of course, and grieve together. This would not be a frightening or threatening prospect if we really understood what grief is. What it does. Grief is not a symptom of our wounds; it’s the medicine for them.

“Grief is praise,” Martín Prechtel writes in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust. “It is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

My colleague was aware that I was nextdoor and could probably hear her. She came over to apologize. I stood up, opened my arms, and began walking toward her, not entirely sure if this was appropriate workplace etiquette, as I am still quite new. But she opened her arms, too, and we held each other for a good 5, maybe 6 seconds or so, and she said thank you, and I said thank you, and I tried to tell her it was a helpful thing that she just did. A powerful thing. She apologized again.

I implored her not to apologize. Or, apologize if you must, but just know that I see it as a sacred thing, what you just did. A thing that helped me get closer to the truth of how I’m really feeling about it all.

She asked me about restorative justice in a case like this. I am, after all, the Restorative Practice Systems Specialist on our team. What do we do with someone like him, she said. What does restorative justice even mean in this case?

I felt shivers, to be asked such a question. As if I could know. As if I am in a position to have an opinion about it. My wife was not killed. I was not shot. What’s possible in the trenches of profound suffering is the prerogative of those who find themselves swallowed into the depths of those trenches.

I told her that we are all one. Not separate. One. I said that each of us will have our own experience of this oneness, this sensitive interconnectedness which makes it so magnificent to be alive, and in moments like this, so painful, and that this is our primary responsibility, to feel what is humanly ours to feel, to feel it all the way through. To rage, if it’s rage. To wish him dead, if that’s your truth. To grieve, if we can get there. Or, like me, to feel kind of bewildered and numb about it all. Healing asks us to be truthful. We cannot fake our way through it or impose some kind of decree that says everyone must love and forgive. We’re not supposed to be holier than we feel. We’re just supposed to feel what’s ours to feel, which is more difficult than it sounds, and holier, too.

I cried a little, writing this. Just a trickle. I may need to get into a circle to go deeper. Get into a group. That can help move things for me. Last night, I received an urgent call from one of the local high schools. They’re preparing to welcome students back and want to be sure they have a restorative circle ready for those who need more space to process this, those brave souls who are willing to wade deeper into the waters of truth and feel whatever it is they might find there. But the hunted man is still at large, so the schools are still closed today. I do hope I get to sit with them whenever the schools reopen, those brave ones. I need them. We need each other. We can’t feel all this alone.