We only grieve for the things we love. Today, those of us who love America – the United States as a noble idea, and the mechanisms designed to bring that ideal into reality, however imperfectly – are grieving.
To be fair, many of us were already grieving before Election Day, even if we didn’t realize it. Anticipatory grief is just as powerful as grief after the horrible fact, but we talk about it far less. When your loved one is getting ever closer to the abyss, you can start experiencing extremely powerful denial. It’s impossible that your loved one could actually die from cancer, the guardrails of modern medicine are too sophisticated and capable to allow that outcome. Fascism and authoritarianism aren’t on the march, a cancer of both politics and the spirit to which other nations might have succumbed, but not us. No decent person could choose someone that repugnant, a living embodiment of all Seven Deadly Sins, a person already proven to be corrupt, friendly to dictators, mendacious beyond all measure, and willing to tear down the Constitution and the rule of law in broad daylight.
But that is, of course, exactly what happened. And it wasn’t something anonymous, like a disease or an accident, that is killing the thing we love. It was other people choosing to kill it. They saw the walking moral pustule that is Donald Trump, and they decided they liked him better Kamala Harris. Catastrophe has a human face, one that we will continue to live with, every day after this one.
Of course, you could have said the same thing in 2016, but now, Trump’s awfulness is not a counterfactual. We don’t have to speculate what will happen when he is installed in the Oval Office. He has already shown us, and told us what he will do this time.
Anticipatory grief can also make you highly productive. You do everything you can to diagnose the reasons for what may lay ahead. You do everything you can think of, no matter how desperate it may seem, to prevent harm from befalling the person or thing you love. But when the terrible moment comes, all that stops. We don’t know what to do next. After having animated by our duty to prevent the awfulness, we become unmoored.
The difficulty imaging what we should be doing with ourselves is a major reason why grief doesn’t take a predictable path. We might say or do incredibly stupid things. We might blame ourselves for the tragedy (If only I had done this one thing…). We might find it impossible to imagine how to live now. We might pretend that the world can return to the former definition of normal. We might anesthetize ourselves to the pain of loss. We might get stuck in that pain, constantly poking the same inflamed nerve over and over again.
The natural question, of course, is What do we do now? We’ll be discussing today, and many days to come, what the right strategy is, at a personal or national scale. Before we do that, however, we should recognize that we are grieving. We should not grieve alone, nor do we need to. We should not act alone, nor do we need to.
