What Are We to Do With All This Grief?
Words are my tools. I grasp the universe in sentences and paragraphs, like laying bricks. A writer’s brain—or, at least, this writer’s brain—is a warehouse of language, the sounds and shapes of words piled high, shifting and moving and filling empty spaces, pulled as from catalog drawers. When words fail me, it’s an undoing.
I do not know how to talk about this grief. This American grief that I now carry in my heart, in my bones, in every cell and sinew of my being. This grief with which I wake up and go to sleep, this grief that has caught me, some nights, on the way back from the bathroom. It’s too big for me to frame, too vast for me to organize. It’s been overflowing the banks of each and every day since March 13, when the nation began to shut down and then looked up to see that we were dying.