Grieve. Connect. Organize.
Content warning: mentions of suicide, death.
I have a feeling others have written about the slogan “Don’t Mourn, Organize” before, about its origins, about what it means, and about the possible problems with that demand. Having just had it explained to me as coming out of radical worker activism in the aftermath of things like the Bayview Massacre, my initial thoughts were: “that’s the epitome of toxic white masculinity” and “you can’t stop grief.”
I have had many experiences with grief. I think a lot of folks have, but I’ve been told I’ve had more than my fair share. And I think about grief a lot. I haven’t read many books on it, but I’ve read articles, blog posts, listened to speakers in real life and on podcasts, and have cast adrienne maree brown’s spell for grief and letting go more times than I can count. There have been times in my life where I have tried to not mourn. To tell myself that doing things in service, in action, in motion, in order to honor the loss is the best and only way to move through it, or to give it meaning. But I never found that method to actually work, and the practice of decolonizing my mind has provided validation that it’s not a method for me.
If you truly believe that the best way to do something with your feelings of sadness and loss is to push through and take action, then I am no one to question you. I don’t know you any better than you know yourself. But I know that we live in a society (here on Turtle Island at least) where even the most “leftist” thinking has roots in white, male, Christian values that has all of us here (of every gender, race, and religion) tangled up. So tangled up that, the way I see it, we don’t know if our roots (“radical” means root) are growing down so that we can grow up towards the sun.
Roots also grow out, in connecting networks that sustain and strengthen.
Some pieces of my grief are held in my heart as the names of people I love who died way too young from car accidents, suicide, overdose, cancer, and the awful random tragedy of sudden death: Mariah, Amy, Christine, Sarah, Senami, Carter, Kelly, Ned, Michael. Another piece is made of personal memories of, and occasional returns to, my own suicidal ideation and planning. I have grief for the younger me, as many of us do. I feel grief for the children I brought into this world. Sometimes I sit in the grief from September 11th, from Hurricane Katrina, and from Covid, and the ways the world changed after as well as the human losses. I grieve for relationships that have ended in beautiful ways, somewhat messy ways, and a few that ended because I name the genocide in Palestine and have red lines around working to end it. It’s possible to say good riddance and still be sad. I grieve that my ancestors are colonizers and grieve that they felt they had to leave their homelands. I grieve for the death of my cat this summer. And on and on.
Most of what I’m naming here is personal grief, but these are also griefs many of us have personal experience with, griefs that can and should be shared and held in community. And there is also collective grief from a shared experience (like a global pandemic); I think many of us are feeling this with Francesca Hong’s loss in the gubernatorial primary, and especially in the context of how close she came.
My own congressional campaign is connected to this general exploration of grief, because I could not have done what I did in the last two years, from starting a business, to showing up for my kids, to running for congress, without giving my mind and body the space it needs, when it needs it, to grieve.
(I don’t grieve my electoral loss for many reasons; chiefly because we accomplished the things I set out to do in the absence of winning, even as my team and I worked as hard as we could to try to win. And so, I’m moving fairly easily into what we do next. However there is some grief from things I experienced as part of my campaign that I need to deal with. And I have seen some signs of some communal grief in the loss, too, in messages people have sent me. It’s hard, and beautiful, wondering if I could have done more so that others wouldn’t be holding that, and what my personal responsibility is. The experience and lessons learned there might be a story for another time.)
As you’re struggling with the outcome of the primary, your own personal losses, and ongoing genocides around the planet, you’re not alone. And you’re not alone no matter when you feel it, either. Grief has no timeline. But it won’t be buried. And it will compound, so that the grief from the loss of loved ones gets tied up in the grief of people dying in places where you know they didn’t have to, but don’t have the power to stop it directly. So that the grief of lost opportunities becomes connected to the secondhand grief of seeing the sadness of your children and friends. And in my experience, it then shows up as anxiety, anger, hate, toxic selfishness, withdrawal, and frantic hopelessness at times we can’t recognize or control, and it can hurt relationships and goals. Healing is always possible, and harm will happen whether we allow ourselves to grieve and feel other feelings or not, but let’s acknowledge that allowing grief to avoid harms is as valid and effective, if not more so, as moving into immediate action through organizing work. And why can’t we do both?
Another ask: let yourself grieve without judgement. Without trying to blame anyone for the loss or figure out why it happened. (This could be considered appropriate bargaining, a stage of grief, but it’s a trap to get stuck there.) For example, when I say “good riddance” in my head to my former Zionist friend, I still hold space for myself for mourning the loss of a person in my life who stayed with me during a panic attack about my sister’s death and who was with me in the early dark days of parenting and covid. Anger has its place in motivating action, but I can’t act on my desires to end genocide, build a world without prisons and police, and win universal healthcare on my own, without resources. Holding space for that sadness allows me to see what I care about and need and rebuild new, more aligned relationships. Grieving Fran’s loss is letting me look back at the people who came together, who believed in fighting for the things her campaign stood for and the things they wanted her to do better. The grief is allowing me to find the hope to move forward creatively at my own pace, and avoid burnout.
I saw how the amount of resources in terms of time and support it took for me to emotionally heal from not having space to grieve previously (so not only was I not able to take my place in the revolution, but others had to step away to bring me back). This, combined with the observations and education I’ve had, is the evidence base for my belief that if we can come together and name good grief (a phrase taken from Dr. Monique Liston’s recent guest service at the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee), with no other plan of action except to hold each other (and there are infinite ways to do that), we create space for much more sustainable work.
