I think our hearts would explode.

on individual & collective grief.

I found out about Amanda like a movie. My mom called, and I answered a little annoyed— I was getting dressed, running late, no time for chit-chat before heading to work. I made it clear, “I’m running late, I can’t talk long.” Mom’s voice was quiet, “Oh…okay, okay. I’ll call you later.” Something was off. “Wait, are you okay?” a pause. Then: “Amanda’s dead,” she sobbed out. I dropped the phone. People say that, people write that, but I mean it, in a very literal sense, I dropped the phone and started repeating the word No. 

No no no no no no no no no no no no. 

* 

No, because this was impossible news. Nonsensical. Amanda was the sister of my best friend, Kimberly, who was the youngest of three, and their eldest sister, Erin, had died just six weeks before this call. We had about a month and a half warning before Erin’s death, a doctor letting her know that it wouldn’t be long. Erin was too young, in her mid-40s. Kimberly was grieving that loss, and I was too—I had grown up with these sisters, having met and best-friend-bonded with Kimberly at four years old—but at least we had warning. The loss of Amanda, just 40 years old, less than two months after losing Erin, was simply unfathomable.  

I don’t want to spend much time on the details. After high school, I didn’t end up staying very close with Pan (that was our nickname for her, a shortened version of our term of affection, “Amanda Panda”), a regret that will now haunt me. So this grief and the story of the loss of her belongs centered on my best friend and her parents. I will say that Pan’s death, to me, is a death that dwells, like so many others, at the intersection of mental health, capitalism, medical violence, and stigma. Rarely do we lose people anymore to things that are not at least partially a result of our viciously inhumane systems. 

Here are some details I will share: Pan was the closest thing I had to an older sister, which meant sometimes we annoyed each other, and Pan’s ability to express annoyance was top-tier. As my mom said, lovingly, during our weepy reminiscing: “If you look up ‘sarcasm’ in the dictionary, there’d be a picture of Amanda.” It was a skill and it was funny, even if I didn’t always think so at the time. This sarcasm was juxtaposed to her ability to express love, which was also top-tier. Pan was a caretaker — she cooked us countless meals during the summers we’d spend together (literally everyday, together), making box mac n’ cheese seem somehow gourmet, flavoring tacos better than I ever managed to. And she looked out for us: spoke honestly when boys we liked were jerks, spoke honestly when she thought we were making bad choices. She did our makeup before every school dance (and her makeup was always flawless). 

She loved to sing, which we did a lot of together, in choir, in the car, in front of the TV stationed to VH1 or MTV. If I remember correctly, she tolerated when Kimberly and I got more into punk and emo, but her heart belonged to earnest showtunes, country music, and, most of all, to Billy Joel. For at least a year, every Sunday, Pan joined me and my mom in our small apartment to watch Sex and the City. She identified most with Charlotte and Miranda, eager for marriage and babies, and at the same time, as previously mentioned: fuckin’ sarcastic. She always smelled good, usually a mix of coffee (she worked at Starbucks) and some perfume. I loved her, so much.

As terrible a reunion it would be, I had been looking forward to seeing her again at Erin’s memorial service. To hug her, to hear her voice, to suggest, “Let’s re-connect?” A regret now, a haunting. 

*

I have been sitting with this personal loss for a week against the backdrop of global, collective loss, and I’m feeling gut-punched by the contrast. Throughout the genocide I have forced myself to sit with the reality of each death as an example of a full, whole life lost. I have read the words of a newly widowed father who lost his wife and newborn twins, learned the never-to-be-realized dreams of a dead six-year-old girl. I have shed thousands of tears watching videos of grieving family and friends over bodies and rubble. It feels like a duty to, as Andrea Gibson urges, shift from “I can’t imagine” to “I can and will imagine.” And yet, there is only so much the imagination can do. 

The grief of losing Amanda did what the idiom promises: it swallowed me. I drove to work that day a zombie, in a haze, weeping at stoplights, wailing in my car, I love you Pan, I miss you, I love you Pan. I told my class a boundaried truth—that I had just received news of a death—and that I might not be my usual energetic self. After wrapping up my second class, I knew I didn’t have it in me to stay for my night class, so I did what I should have done with the whole day, and canceled. I did the bare minimum in life and work, making time for random crying fits, making time to help Kimberly with childcare. It was, as

Sarah Jaffe

explains in her new book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, “a rupture.” 

“It is a sudden, abrupt, even violent break from the status quo,” Jaffe writes. “...Grief is a rage and anger and frustration and sadness and sometimes a kind of horrible joy; it is less an emotion than a state of being. It is a being-undone.”  

The genocide(s), and the hurricane(s), and the mass shootings and the daily overdoses and daily police shootings, they affect me, certainly. I am angry and sad, or I am enraged and devastated. But if I am being entirely honest, they rarely swallow me, not so completely. I dream of collective rupture and the possibilities that Jaffe describes happening amidst collective mourning: “[I]t is an assertion of a different logic….To take the space and the time to sit with what has happened, to talk about it in public, is to challenge the logic of productivity that hustles people back into the workplace after loss.” I’ve witnessed this myself, most of us have— at the start of Covid, in the streets as we mourned George Floyd and so many others who died at the hands of police. But, still, when it comes to the deaths of those who we do not know personally, there is, inevitably, distance. 

There are a lot of James Baldwin quotes circulating these days, and for good reason. He had a righteous and radical lens on ills in the world, and he also had a way with words, one that leaves a reader somehow hopeful even when he’s offering a sobering dose of despair. Here’s one I have been thinking of: "The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality." 

I love the sentiment behind this. If it came true, that every person saw every child as their own kin of any kind, of course we would not allow wars, nor prisons, nor capitalism, nor borders. But I don’t think it’s possible—or even preferable—to ask people to hold the kind of grief that comes with losing someone in our lives. I don’t mean this poetically, I mean it literally: I think our hearts would explode. 

And it would immobilize us; this is radical in its own right, but as

Joshua P. Hill

recently wrote: “Over the past year I have ruminated on the bleak nature of absorbing horror after horror through our various screens, and our social media culture can lead us to think that the worst crimes of humanity just demand our attention, rather than our collective and decisive action — which is what this moment in fact demands.” I can tell you, from the deep pit of grief, that I am, currently, in no place for action. 

So I think whatever neurological or spiritual barrier we have that allows us to bear witness without being swallowed is mostly good. What I am interested in thinking about now is how the reality of the swallowing kind of grief, the rupturing and personal kind, is existing, energetically, across the globe. I wish we could take more seriously how this pain is in the poisoned air we breathe, the contaminated water we drink. This is what Christina Sharpe has written about as “distributed mourning,” and, of the current moment: “ambient genocide.” I wish we could understand that when the kids say “the vibes are off,” or when we have trouble answering work emails or even texts from friends, it’s because we are walking through the reverberation of a million shovels breaking earth for graves. And also through the howling pain of everyone the dead have left alive. 

I don’t have easy answers on how to combat the necropolitics of settler colonialism. Given my beliefs and experience in movement work, I think it will rely on a mix of sabotage and violence, love and spiritual awakening. We’re not there yet, not enough of us, but I’m lucky to be in community with people who feel committed to these and other tactics.  

As a writer—which is what I am, shamefully, more than a revolutionary—I am left trying to make meaning of the horrors. And I keep thinking of another writer, Tony Kushner, who made meaning of the AIDS crisis, another moment of mass death. The final scene of his beautiful play Angels in America features Harper on a flight through the clouds, and she is telling us about a vision: 

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

I can’t stop thinking about those souls, “limbs all akimbo.” I imagine all our dead friends—and all the dead strangers so many of us take time to mourn—hands together, clasped and mending the ozone layer. I believe in spirits—I talk to my dead grandparents, my dead baby, late pets, to Jesús and now to Pan. But still I wonder if Harper’s vision might be more potent if instead of our loved ones’ souls’, we turned to the molecules of our collective grief—the salt from our tears, the echoes of our wails, and eventually the momentum of our pain into action—to take on that task of repair. 

I have felt despair this past year more than I ever have before. But being in a moment of acute personal grief is reminding me of the power of this sadness. We are each of us—if we are lucky enough to love in our lives— going to be frozen by the trauma of grief. We will repeat “No” on our tongue, feral and refusing. But we will shapeshift with the changes of it, and meet others on the moving side. And we can choose—without any demand for some false sense of gratitude— to let our grief carry us toward a better world. I have to believe that’s so.