Many years ago, when our family would make the annual pilgrimage back to the Midwest to visit relatives and friends, we were often met at the airport by my wife’s parents. On the ride from MSP to their home, my son and I would overhear conversations about friends and family, the general gossip, and catch up on the news. Years later, when he was older, my son would refer to this as the annual game of “guess who died.” This was because much of the news was an update on his grandparents’ robust circle of friends and the reality of their declining years.
In the last couple of weeks, I feel like that game has been the theme of the news cycle. First, Dolly Parton passed away, then Wendell Berry, then Gloria Steinem, not to mention the anniversary of 911.
>Of course, let’s recognize that the tragedy of 9/11 was not and is not a game. We lived in Brooklyn during the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Eight years later, I recalled the incident as I heard the news on WFAN radio after dropping my son off at school on the fateful September morning. The theologian Walter Brueggemann identified the parallel between the fall of the Twin Towers and the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. Both events shattered the nation’s self-understanding. The United States and ancient Israel had self-serving national narratives of God on our side and invincibility. Those narratives tumbled to the ground. The correct response should have been grief, lament, and sorrow. I remember we embraced those qualities, but only for a few days. Quickly, we moved on to retaliation.
Bruce Springsteen’s album, The Rising, gave expression to a variety of thoughts and feelings. His song “Further on (Up the Road)” articulated one of those emotions, namely anger. On the subsequent tour, he realized very early on that the song was feeding into our national desire for revenge in a disproportionate manner. He quickly dropped it from the rest of that tour.
Grief takes many forms. Anger is one of them, but you can’t live with anger forever. If you do, it turns to resentment and bitterness. I can’t help but wonder whether all our current hostility might be rooted in an unattended national grief.
Wendell, Dolly, and Gloria all knew grief in their own lives. Dolly and Gloria each grew up in extreme poverty, and Wendell was born and raised on a farm in rural 1930s Depression-era Kentucky. These early experiences forged in each of them an understanding and attitude in which loss, hardship, and love shaped their contributions to society.
If grief is not tended, it goes underground, festers, and eventually makes itself known. In their own ways, these three brought their grief forward. Wendel Berry understood the laments of lost land and the loss of people who died too soon. He expressed this in his poem, “A Meeting.”
In a Dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
Dolly Parton impressed me most by her activities and entrepreneurial endeavors to bring economic opportunities to her hometown in Tennessee. She knew poverty and its tragic, destructive force in people’s lives. She wanted to do something about it. Her grief channeled into rebuilding her community as well as her art.
I realized this when I started writing this essay. Her role as Truvy Jones in the 1989 film *Steel Magnolias*. The film is a classic that shows how a group of Southern women relies on humor, friendship, and resilience to cope with heartbreaking tragedies and sudden loss.
Gloria Steinem founded Ms. Magazine and gave voice to feminism, doing so with grace, dignity, and determination. As a young person, she witnessed the misogyny her mother endured, and later, her years living in India tied the feminist movement to the grassroots movement for racial and economic justice. She was an icon of the late 20th century liberation movement, bringing a voice to the capacity of women. She turned her grief into power.
Last weekend, I read Erika Kirk’s reflections in a New York Times Op-Ed. Though I’m prone to recoil from the writings of people affiliated with right-wing politics, this was different. She articulated a universal sentiment. I found a striking sentence in the middle of her essay that reminded me how grief connects us all. She writes, “Grief is universal. It doesn’t care who you voted for, where you come from or what you believe. Those who have walked through grief know that the waves never completely disappear; they aren’t supposed to.”
We all know grief. The loss of loved ones, the loss of innocence, the stolen dreams, and the forces that shamed us along the way. When I’m with difficult people, I try to remember that. When I am being difficult myself, I try to recall my own grief. Pausing for a moment to consider that helps me grow my compassion, because we are all grieving, both individually and collectively. Knowing that can help heal our own wounds and perhaps the greater national and global wounds we are witnessing in these times.
Previously Published on The Notebooks of James Hazelwood
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