Dancing
with Everything
Grieving Devastation
We’ve seen it on our screens for days now, the devastation of entire neighborhoods; schools, places of worship, shops, restaurants, and landmarks, all through the eyes of photojournalists whose job it is to communicate and record what’s happening in our larger world. When asked to select and describe their photos, these AP journalists added words.
Here are some of comments on their photos –
- “Having covered dozens of wildfires, some of the largest in California’s history, I immediately knew the scale of destruction was unlike anything I had ever seen.” Ethan Swope
- “One of the biggest challenges in taking this photo was ensuring my safety in such a hazardous environment. The air was thick with smoke, making it hard to breathe… Documenting the aftermath while respecting the emotions of survivors is always a challenge.” Jae C Hong
- “When you hear that thousands of homes have been destroyed, a picture like this reminds you that each of those homes represent the memories collected by the people who live there. For some it stretches back generations.” John Loucher
- “I chose this picture because of the trees. The dramatic light illuminated the yellow caution tape that cordoned off townhomes and trees that had been burned by the Eaton Fire. It was a crime scene. Scorched trees are everywhere. I’m going to keep photographing the trees. They are part of us.” Carolyn Kaster
- “The (broken) statue makes me think of the tragedy of Pompeii. The volcanic eruption turned humans into preserved stone statues. The Southern California fires have turned us headless and homeless. We lay down with our arms crossed motionless in the face of an environmental catastrophe.” Damian Dovarganes
“Devastation” is the word that most fits this situation. We speak of devastation when something has been “brought to ruin by violent action.” This was no ordinary forest fire, but a case of tornado-type winds fanning the flames of a fire fed by acres and miles of exceptionally dry vegetation. As the days have gone on, the situation has fulfilled its promise of what devastation does, “to reduce to chaos” not only the lives of firefighters and families directly involved in fighting or escaping the disaster’s rages, but an entire region of the southwestern United States. As news of the “disorder “spreads across the nation and the world, people recognize our common “helplessness,” to repair what has been destroyed and to prevent such occurrences in the future.
The Many Faces of Loss
When losses occur its helpful to name them accurately. These losses caused by the fires are Traumatic Losses, like those caused by war or other natural disasters like floods. They come suddenly, ‘out of the blue, ‘carrying with them Cumulative Losses on the way to becoming, for many people, Living Losses or Chronic Sorrows. The effects of some losses will endure throughout a person’s life, and beyond, continuing to cause their life to fall short of what they had expected it to be.
It’s extremely helpful when people respond with kindness and compassion, responses we don’t see often enough when things are going well in a community. Rather than asking, “Why Me? Or Why Us” images of people rolling up their sleeves and getting busy doing what they can do, what needs to be done –– helping one another, providing food, clothing and shelter, provides inspiration and solace for those directly involved, but also for those of us recognizing ourselves in this situation. As Frances Weller reminds us, in his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, “Everything we love we will lose…Everything is a gift, and nothing lasts.”
What Can We Do Now?
During the time I was researching responses to loss for my book, The Art of Grieving, I worked with several organizations of nuns. They shared a ritual they do when losses occur in their communities and beyond. This ritual begins with a question, one that each of us can ask ourselves in this situation of horrific losses. As we respond to what this event means in our own lives, to the lives of our loved ones, and to the future of life on this planet, we ask this question. With awareness of the possibilities of Secondary Losses that will no doubt follow the present ones, and of Anticipatory Loss as we look into the future, we ask and respectfully wait for answers to this question, “To what life are these losses calling us? To what life are they specifically calling me?”
Image and quotes from the AP article here: https://apnews.com/article/california-los-angeles-wildfires-photos-8c2f2767b3722ccbb98d6e78a563c1f4
Transitions
Here we are in the time of our yearly transition–looking back and remembering the past year. We’re saying good-bye to the old year, (the bearded man stooped over his cane) and while at the same time, greeting and looking ahead into this new year, (the diapered baby draped with the just-being-born-new year clearly labeled on him.) Depending on how many of these transitions you have had and what those experiences have been like in recent years, you may not want to give much attention to this event, just see it as a mark on the calendar. I’m sure it’s been that for me some years. But this year seemed special as I look back, enjoying the highlight of my book The Art of Grieving finally coming together enough to launch. From years of development––meditations, reflections, conversations, blogs, presentations, and collaborations with other artists to a book you can hold in your hand and formally launch–that’s a huge transition by itself. Many of you reading this note have been a part of these activities and the “village” it took to create this book––please accept my deepest gratitude. And I’d love to have you with me as I work to get it out into the larger world.
Our holiday family reunion is just coming to an end as I am writing this. Seventeen people came and went to and from Palm Springs California throughout the week from Pennsylvania and Nebraska, Massachusetts, Nevada, and New Mexico, and several towns in California. It took a spread sheet to figure out how many places to set at the dinner table for each meal. Despite the challenges there were multiple special moments of sharing memories of past reunions as well as opportunities to create new ones.
It will take a while to process the richness of this week though I got a head start during a phone conversation with a dear friend from back home a couple of days ago. She knows many back stories of the characters in my family tree, so her listening skills helped me recognize and acknowledge some major and minor miracles that occurred in our time together. There is such power in being surrounded by those to whom you belong and that belong to you.
We head for home this Thursday, quite tired, yet full of gratitude and ideas to follow up on in the coming year. I hope that your holidays have provided you with similar gifts as well. Going forward – Here are some of the classes, groups and keynote speeches I am looking forward to in 2025.
- Radical Self Care Series Class online with Christine Gautreaux resumes Tuesday January 7 2025 at 11:30 am eastern, recurring weekly
- Friday InterPlay Playshop online resumes January 10th 2025
- Art of Grieving online class begins Tuesday January 14, 2025, at 3 pm eastern time, recurring monthly on the second Tuesday of each month
- Keynote speech in Pittsburgh February 26, 2025 at Fox Chapel Rotary Club
- Keynote speech for Temple Rodof Shalom Brotherhood, Sunday May 4, 2025
- Pre-Conference Workshop at the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association Conference in Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. June 19, 2025
- Keynote at the IEATA 16th International Conference – Sunday June 22, 2025
Another note: My weekly blogs are moving to the Substack platform so watch for that soon. Meanwhile – I hope to connect with you in an online class or through a written communication, at a workshop or during a collaborative art project. May this New Year bring you long awaited gifts and opportunities for joyful collaborations.
The Gifts of Remembering
One of the cruelest outcomes of the “put it all behind you” and “move on with your life,” philosophy of managing loss is that we miss out on the gifts and life lessons that come through remembering. In a couple of recent events, I have been reminded of some of those gifts.
I moved away from Detroit Michigan more than 50 years ago, but through the years, I’ve stayed in touch with one of my dance teachers and mentors, Harriet Berg. Last week I was blessed to attend an online celebration of Harriet’s 100th Birthday. Her son and daughter-in-law did the arranging and with her help, the invitations.
We celebrants were former students, performers in her productions, or children of her close friends, now deceased. We traded stories of how she had influenced our lives, reliving some of those experiences as we described them. “You’re all over our house,” I told Harriet as my husband and I had pulled framed posters and photos from the walls to offer a “show and tell” about my life with Harriet. in those years when I was the choreographers’ assistant and founding member of Festival Dancers, her dance company out of the Jewish Community Center, she was a central figure in my life. “Here we are, Harriet, costumed to perform Charles Widman’s, ‘All About Women,’ that Widman himself taught us when you brought him to the Detroit area in the early 70’s.”
After the event was over, and we spoke of doing it again if that turns out to be possible, I realized that what we celebrants had created was a kind of memorial. As we sharing our memories with one another and with Harriet, we were creating a “living memorial,” sometimes called a “living funeral.” Such an event is done in the presence of a person who realizes that they are living in their final days. However, her final days did not seem imminent, at least to her as she reminded us that her father made it to 103. ‘I’m just trying to catch up with him,” she said.
Today is the one-year anniversary of my youngest sister Maureen’s unexpected death at 69. Tonight is a regular online gathering of members of The Wing & a Prayer Pittsburgh Players, my InterPlay performance troupe. Since these are the people who have companioned me on the long road that became The Art of Grieving, I’ve asked them to think of a particular loved one, now deceased and bring stories of that person to our meeting. We’ll use the dancing, singing, storytelling forms of InterPlay to celebrate these important people in your lives as we celebrate my sister Maureen. I’m especially interested in what situations or times in our present lives are we reminded of our special persons? How and when do they come to us now?
Grief, Money and Dirty Pain
To become resilient and grow from what happens to us, we must choose to face and metabolize the pain of loss. That’s what the art of grieving is. Psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem describes “clean pain’ as that which is faced and transformed while “Dirty Pain” is pain that is ignored or denied and stuck in our bodies. It interferes with our thoughts and ability to function, causing us to transmit the pain to others in an unfocused or purposefully planful way. It seems likely we’ve experienced a version of the latter this week.
The television broadcast is interrupted with breaking news. We see the shadowy figure of a hooded man pointing a gun with a silencer on it towards a figure of another man who is walking in front of him in the Wall Street section of NYC. We’re told that the second man was a 50-year-old health care executive, and that the hooded man shot him in the back and killed him.
We soon learn that three bullet casing were found, each labeled with a word, Deny, Defend, and Depose. Along with millions of other people in the US, I recognize these words as descriptive of the process health insurance companies use to deny patient and provider claims. As health care providers, my husband and I immediately added another D word –Delay. I was immediately transported to January 1992, when “managed care” entered the field of behavioral health, 5 years after we had established our own successful health care clinic. Divisions of health insurance companies become gatekeepers between providers and patients. Employees they hired determined what claims were allowed, and eventually how much was paid to those who provided the service. In the spiral of my own grief, I saw again the new furniture the health care company displayed proudly when I was at a meeting to discuss their paying our invoices in a timelier manner. While we waited, and juggled our own cash flow, I expressed my anger by researching, writing and presenting a paper at a health care conference on the 42 steps that now became necessary for employees of our company to accomplish in order for us to be paid. Any missteps out of order (service not pre-authorized) we would not get paid at all.
The public reaction of humor or scorn on social media to the murder seemed to be people offering the company “a dose of their own medicine,” ––reactions that shocked many people. But given the number of people who have been denied coverage for their own treatment or for the care of a loved one’s illness, it seems likely that the incident connected people to their own unprocessed pain. Add to that the fact that 500,000 people per year experience medical bankruptcy due to unpaid medical bills while health care executives are paid, as this gentleman was, 9 million dollars a year. It’s clear that our systems are broken and unjust and not serving individuals or the greater good.
Returning to Menakem’s powerful book,” My Grandmother’s Hands,” the path forward does not mean just providing more security for people working as executives in our healthcare system. Rather, we need to recognize and process the immense pain that the system causes (clean pain) and not just respond from our most wounded parts. (dirty pain). When enough people face the problem, we are more likely to heal ourselves and the systems that are meant to serve us.
The Power of Community Art
With all the media attention on the incoming president’s appointments, you may not have heard that this week, in honor of World AIDS Day 2024, sections of the AIDS memorial quilt were exhibited for the first time on the White House South Lawn. Our current President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden hosted an event with survivors, their families, and advocates, offering a powerful tribute to those who have been lost to HIV/AIDS. Each square of the quilt has been handcrafted by friends and family members in memory of someone who died of AIDS since the disease came on the scene in the US in the 1980s. The AIDS Memorial Quilt began with nearly 2000 individual squares and was displayed for the first time in 1985. It now has 48000 panels, weighs 54 tons and spans 1.2 million square feet. In the nearly 40 years since it began, it has traveled and been exhibited in communities all over the US.
For those of us who have been impacted by HIV/AIDS, the expression, “better late than never applies” with this exhibition and with how long it took for the governmental authorities, politicians, and scientists to recognize the threat of AIDS and put resources into addressing it. Millions died, included our 31-year-old son, Kenneth. In my mother’s memoir, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal there is a scene between Ken’s father and I, holding a conversation in a hospital corridor when we first learned of Ken’s diagnosis in 1993.
“How is it we get to go to the head of the class?” I spit the words into the atmosphere. “No ten years of symptom-free HIV status. No time to try alternative approaches to staying healthy. Nothing I know will be of any use now.”
George seems to be studying the patterns on the floor. “When are these people gonna wise up? They pay no attention to nutrition and then wonder why people get sick. “
” And where were the Centers for Disease Control? I raged. “Why didn’t they pay more attention to this disease when it first came on the scene?”
Finally looking me in the eye, former radio broadcaster George, said in his most professional newscaster cadence, “They ignored it because it was discovered in gay men.”
The AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the largest community arts project in history. It played a huge part in gaining support from health care authorities to address the disease and in eliminating the stigma that was part of what caused the disease to run rampant in the gay community in the US.
Why might this exhibition of these handcrafted art pieces sewn together and sprawled out on the White House Lawn be important at this time?
As one of the surviving family members, I’m glad to be reminded of the role an art piece such as this has played in helping the public identify the people behind the numbers when we learn of a communicable disease. Numbers are just numbers until an art piece shows us how many individuals they represent–the people behind the numbers. I also appreciate the opportunity to remember my son and his friends who became victims not only of the disease, but of the way it was handled by the governmental agencies that our taxpayer dollars had funded to keep us safe and healthy. After all we’ve been through it doesn’t seem the time to put people into leadership positions who have no experience or intention to achieve what these organizations are charted to do.
Here’s a link to Warrior Mother – https://amzn.to/3CZqJJj
View the AIDS Memorial Quilt here https://www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt
December 5, 2024, the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP) is convening a symposium to address core aspects of quality of life for people living with HIV. Portions of the summit can be viewed virtually Exit Disclaimer from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. EST.
Grief at the Holidays
As the holidays approach, the subject of Grief becomes more common in articles, social media posts and advice columns. And for good reason. These special days of family celebration can be reminders of who will not be at the table this year. And perhaps as the rotation of another year comes around again, we are returned in memory to a time we still long for –when the children were small, when we lived in a part of the country were the weather seemed to cooperate with our holiday spirit, when gas was under $2, or when holiday gatherings did not involve the accommodation of complicated diets and eating programs. We may remember an idyllic time, which many never have existed, when we didn’t dread or try to avoid gathering at a common table with loved ones, some in deep grief over crushing losses while others ecstatic at the victory of their candidates.
So, what ancient recipes can we call upon to help us navigate these unsettling waters?
As a grief advocate and author of The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us to Grieve and Live Our Best Lives I am often asked to speak or write about these dilemmas and challenges that are not unique or new to this year or this place. I grew up in Louisville Kentucky in the 1950s though my ancestors were not from there, so I was surprised to learn that during the war between the states, which was less than 100 years prior, Kentucky had been a border state, not officially joining the North or the South in the Civil War. I heard stories that were still being told of families who had sons that fought on different sides of the conflict. I remember thinking that must have made for difficult family gatherings.
There was a time when we knew how to grieve, when we understood as a culture that grief is not a stairway we climb where, we tick off a series of emotions on each step, and reaching the top, put our palms together and declare we are finished. There was a time when we knew that grief was not just a private matter, something to keep to oneself so as not to bring others down, but as a time to companion one another with compassion through disrupted terrain. To enter ritual space together for a time between the worlds, not to put the past behind us but to honor and keep close through the years to what we will always love.
I offer the visual art image of the spiral as an image that can help us grieve. A well-known author of the 20th century C.S. Lewis wrote of his own bereavement process in the book,” A Grief Observed.” He wrote it under another name, which tells us something of the unpopularity of the topic. He shared what I believe are elements of a universal model. “For in grief, nothing stays put. One keeps emerging from a phase but it always recurs. Round and round everything repeats. Am I going in circles or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”
The spiral is found in nature and in cultures worldwide, one of the oldest intuitive symbols of the physical, mental and spiritual development of a human life as it winds its way through the seasons of its years. Grief is the processing of our life experiences to determine what to cherish and what to hold dear, and what to let go of that will no longer serve us and the person we become in the future. For this we need a new perspective. The spiral brings us back to the same place each season but on a more evolved level. The anniversary of the loss occurs or a situation of remembering occurs, and the mourner now has another year of living without their loved one. They are viewing the situation from a different vantage point.
The festivities of the family gatherings provide opportunities to use the art of storytelling to bring those gone from our sight into the present moment and to honor their contribution. For those too young to have known the deceased, they are shown where they have come from, and what has allowed them to have their turn at life. Don’t worry about repeating your stories. In my family, we kids knew Auntie’s stories so well we could tell them ourselves, but we begged to hear them again and again. At the time, I thought it was the humor in them, and the fanciful way she told them by adding made-up new passages which we of course, would call her on. But now I think we needed to hear them again and again because the subtext of the stories was that our ancestors survived tough challenges so there’s a pretty good chance that we will survive tough things too.
If you live in the Pittsburgh area, I’d love to have you join me for an evening service on the theme of dealing with grief at holiday time. The program Blue Christmas is next Tuesday December 3rd at 7 pm in the chapel of First United Methodist Church 5401 Centre Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15232.
Reentry
We’re finally getting the rain we’ve needed all summer which keeps me from my usual slow withdrawal from the outdoors as I return to Pittsburgh from the piney woods of east Texas. The fall women’s retreat was later than usual this year, and I needed it more than usual. But, what’s usual these days? Wisdom comes from what’s worked in the past, but I tell myself we’re in a different climate now, more unpredictable, requiring different creative practices. Sleeping in one’s own bed is still rewarding after a 3-hour drive to the airport followed by a 3-hour wait in the Admiral’s Club (a special treat now that I have my own frequent flyer membership card) followed by a 3-hour plane flight and, after my husband picks me up, a half hour car ride home.
In retrospect, the 3 days in the woods are always different, yet overwhelmingly the same for me since 1991. It’s always uncertain, who will show up, who will get to come. We call the names of those departed from this life, and those housebound or struggling in particular situations. We remind one another of other times, other years when we switched places on what native American’s call the Medicine Wheel and what I think of as the grief spiral. This time we included especially our country, and the larger world impacted by our country’s past, recent and future actions. We meditated on what is ours to do, in the long list of what needs to be done to continue serving life. One certainty–being in the Women’s Circle is always worth all the trouble and inconvenience it is to get there and back. And for a while, maybe a long while, I am different, always aware that I am because we are.
Invitation – I couldn’t take you to the woods with me, but this Sunday November 24th from 4 to 5:30 pm eastern time I’d love to have you join me and several other InterPlay artists as we meet on the Let’s Reimagine online platform. We’ll be exploring themes from my recent book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Art-making Help Us Grieve and Life Our Best Lives.
Here’s the link to register:
https://letsreimagine.org/76768/the-art-of-grieving-how-art-art-making-help-us-grieve
The Arts and Collective Grieving
Collective grief is stimulated by large scale losses and tragedies, some impacting people and communities far from the initial ground zero of the event. I began putting together the material for my current book during the lock down phase of COVID when most everyone’s list of recent losses was extensive. In my dance studio turned media studio I opened my zoom window on the world and family members, students and colleagues from around the country joined me in taking the first steps in grieving –recognizing and naming individual and communal losses. In the years since, there has been no shortage of community-wide tragedies that need to be collectively grieved. Reports of mass shootings in schools, shopping malls and places of community worship or celebration flicker across our various size screens along with the images of environmental climate devastations like floods, fires, and earthquakes.
Writing The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives was a discovery project, one begun as a writing practice blog. I looked at most everything that was unsettling, disappointing, even devastating, in our individual and communal lives through the lens of loss and the need to grieve it. The secondary emphasis to my exploration was how art done on our behalf or made by a mourner for themselves or as they companion another, can help us to grieve. Discovering these connections offered extensive examples and confirmed their powerful effect.
- Healing the Culture
Art can call attention to a cultural problem or injustice in such a way that it makes an emotional impact, inspiring people to act to change the unfortunate circumstances that created it. I learned of the problem of more than one-thousand missing and murdered native women and children in North America when visiting the native American relatives of my native American granddaughter. Kyra was 9 years old at the time when she joined a friend and I as we visited an art instillation of the Red Dress Project in the desert near Palm Springs, CA. Standing in the dry dusty breeze we move our focus to the red dresses hanging on clotheslines, each dress blowing independently at various rhythms as the wind swirls around them. We experience the women’s presence, in this marking of the absence of their bodies to fill the dresses.
In the quiet, yet powerfully loud social commentary, I hear a protest and remember the wisdom of grief expert, Francis Weller. He suggests, “Part of the medicine we need right now is to come out of the fiction that grief is individual.” Or to imagine that grief ends with the generation that first experienced the loss. “If the sequestered grief that surrounds us made a sound, the whole world would be weeping.”
- Art helps the healing of those impacted by horrific incidents of loss–gun violence,
History and fate had put me in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania a few miles from the Tree of Life Synagogue where on 10.27. 2018, a lone gunman killed eleven worshipers and wounded six including several Holocaust survivors. In the years since I have had the opportunity to closely observe and participate in the communal rituals and art projects that the 10.27 Partnership has initiated and coordinated. I wrote about the 5th anniversary Commemoration Ceremony to honor and remember the lives lost.
“As leaves flutter gently down from nearby trees, friends and family members share stories of their deceased loved ones before an audience of several hundred community members…Musicians play restored string instruments from the Violins of Hope, an exhibition of instruments played by Jewish musicians before and during the holocaust. The message, communicated through the rhythmic tones of the music is one we are all living: how the human spirit can overcome even the most daunting of circumstances.”
A good place to explore the topic of Collective Grief is the online platform Let’s Reimagine Life, Love and Loss. Here’s a link to programs on this month’s theme– https://letsreimagine.org/the-whole-world-in-our-hands
Join me and colleagues Sunday afternoon November 24 at 4 pm eastern time – https://letsreimagine.org/76768/the-art-of-grieving-how-art-art-making-help-us-grieve
The Morning After
I arrived home last night from my job as a poll watcher about 9 pm. I warmed up some soup and checked the television news for early returns as the polls were closing across the country. Checking into my own body, I realized I had “left it all on the field,” as the sports athletes say, after weeks of door-to-door canvasing and nightly phone banking and I went to bed. I was surprised seeing the sorrow on my husband’s face when I awoke at 8 am since I was not expecting any definitive election results to be available this early. In 2019 it took 6 days for enough of the votes to get tallied to declare a winner, and my county in PA, along with my friend Christine’s in GA were the ones that determined that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were going to the White House.
Rather than checking the news reports I attended to the text stream of my women’s spirituality group which included this encouragement from our teacher and leader Glenda Taylor “I have no shallow words to say, but I do send calm certainty, ‘Love endures and is never defeated.”
Next in the stream my friend Christine asks, “Who are we in this moment? When our hearts are broken, and cynicism is sneaking in to help us side-eye our neighbors.”
I’m reminded of the people whose front porches I have stood on throughout the Pittsburgh region and of the essential similarities I found. No matter the size and quality of the home, or the amount of land surrounding it, or the idyllic peaceful scene of the neighborhood most everyone is afraid of their neighbors. Many are afraid of family members. Most wouldn’t put up yard signs supporting candidates, and some expressed concerns for my safety as I traveled in their neighborhood. “You be careful now.”
Christine continues, “Who do I want to be in this moment? Yes, there is a part of me that wants to curl up in a ball under the covers…but a bigger part that gazes out through my tears and feels the resolve in my heart that there is more goodness in the world–let me look to find it and work towards it. I want to be the light that shies hope in a dark situation.”
During my day long stint as a poll watcher, I was able to observe that goodness and light in a dark situation. First off, I ran into a musician friend, Mimi Jong, who was participating in a project called Play for the Vote. “What are you doing here?” she greeted me cheerfully. “You don’t live in this neighborhood. “Though it wasn’t my neighborhood, I, along with the poll workers and people who came to vote, as we moved in and out of the building were serenaded by the calming tones of the musical collaboration between Mimi’s Chinese erhu and her colleagues’ robust accordion. I received another gift in the opportunity to get to know an experienced woman poll worker who had worked these polls for over twenty years. I noticed nearly everyone, both young and old, who entered the auditorium space stopped to give her a hug before or after placing their votes. Turns out she had been a crossing guard in the neighborhood for over twenty years, a job she had dearly loved, and she was still, years later beloved by all.
Back to the text stream–Jean expressed her “need simply to mourn. Deeply. Mourn for that which has claimed power and mourn for that which has lost and will surely suffer. Yes, I will rise up and fight…but I need space and time to grieve as well.”
For me, this is the time to mourn- to listen to the wisdom of my own body, to rest, and dance, and wail and moan–to express whatever sound is there. This reality is unprocessed–we do not know what this loss will teach us and what it will ask of us. I am sustained by the knowledge that I will be in our women’s circle in person soon.
The doorbell rings and I experience another action to take when the answer to our prayers is, for this time at least – a firm no. My colleague and dancing social worker friend Lynn is here to present me with a bouquet of flowers. It is an expression of her gratitude for what I have been doing on behalf of the citizens of the Pittsburgh region. She discovered that acts of kindness make her feel better as she helps someone else feel better. What a delightful surprise in this dark day. This takes me back to Glenda’s message–“Love endures and is never defeated”. And a message that emerged from the 10.27.2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue that has been ringing true since then –“Love is stronger than hate,” and so, too, we together are.
Here’s an article by Daniel Hunter, recommended by my mentor and colleague Cynthia Winton-Henry. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/
I also recommend online programs on the Reimagine platform, especially on communal grieving – https://letsreimagine.org/experiences/upcoming-events
Remembering and Making Meaning through The Art of Storytelling
Last Sunday, amid the extreme bruhaha in the swing state of Pennsylvania related to the upcoming national election I attended the Commemoration Ceremony of the sixth anniversary of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. Eleven people lost their lives, and four others were injured in the worst attack on Jews in the history of the United States. This occurred in an area of the city locals always referred to as “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership, the organization that has provided resources and support to the Jewish and non-Jewish community throughout the past six years began the commemoration. She acknowledged the impact of that event. “We’re here today to remember six years ago when our Pittsburgh community and Jewish people around the world were forever changed by an act of violence, changed because of the loss and suffering, but also changed because of the incredible outpouring of kindness and solidarity.” A part of the legacy of the attack is the realization that “we are stronger together.” Since I have attended most all of the these yearly commemorations and ceremonies I would add that today they prove the truth in the slogan born of the event, “Love is stronger than hate.”
I watch family members and survivors of the violence approach the platformed stage, assist one another in navigating the steps and in lighting the candles, as the names of their loved ones are called. They offer hugs and appreciation for one another and to the professional helpers that Mr. Rogers always told the children to look for. I look around the large, packed room that holds maybe 100 people, some seated, many more standing on both sides of the room. I take in the energy of the supportive respectful silence. My mind travels back to images of people I have been meeting and talking with as I’ve been canvassing for the election in many outlying neighborhoods in the region. These people here look like they could be related to the potential voters I have met but the fear of one’s neighbors and the anxiety and uncertainty of the future I found outside this room are thankfully absent from here.
Noah Schoen, the co-creator of the Meanings of October 27th Oral History Project summarized what he learned from the stories of 100 Jewish and non- Jewish members of the Pittsburgh community. With some time to reflect, they were invited to tell their own stories about the attack and what it now meant to them. “I learned two things,” Schoen said. “We get to choose the stories we tell about the attack. We get to choose how and what we remember.
As he speaks, I see an image I choose to always remember from that time. A few days after 10/27/2018 my husband and I called a Jewish couple who are close friends and asked if we could come with them to the next Friday night service in their synagogue. It’s dusk as we arrive with our friends and park the car. Moving towards the entrance to the synagogue our path is lit by dozens of people ahead of us holding lighted candles. Reaching the sidewalk to the entrance we join other congregants and process through two rows of Christian and non-Jewish neighbors, each holding a candle and standing in a silent solidarity of support. I look at this scene through damp eyes.
The word “oscillation” gets my attention as Schoen suggests the back and forth between horror and appreciation that’s needed to tell a story that builds resilience and helps people to tell their stories in what I call, “transforming ways.” Such stories as these are too big for one or even two bodies to hold. They must be told and held in community. Oral History is that kind of storytelling. According to Schoen, “The truth is multi-vocal art; a collection of individual narratives that paints a more nuanced picture of the community’s experience than any one story. Let’s keep telling stories about that day, about the people who we lost and the people who touched us, about what we can’t seem to get over and about what we never expected to learn.”
Healing from atrocities takes a lifetime, but in community, what is broken mends, not by putting it behind us but by remembering and keeping its transforming meanings and community members close.
