Sitting with the realization that many now use the phrase "the pandemic" in the same way that the term "capitalism" is bandied about:
As a hauntological signification, naming not an object in the world, with a history and a consequence, but rather gesturing over one's shoulder to the vague vicinity wherein spectres of that which one is unprepared to speak, unequipped to name, are commonly said to have been sighted.
Sitting now with the further realization that "a cold" has always been hauntological:
Referring not to any of hundreds of infectious types, but rather to the unwelcome unease of one's unwilling awareness of an inescapably bodily response to the unseen.
Not a disease but a discomfiture, a preference for absence of awareness of that which is absent from awareness.
People attend the funeral ceremony of Ukrainian poet and serviceman Maksym Kryvtsov who was killed in action fighting against Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Independence Square in Kyiv. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
ourners react during the funeral of Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. REUTERS/Arafat Barbakh
I know next to none of you here personally, but I wanted share an incredibly personal message.
Over the holidays my wife died, suddenly, and unexpectedly. I'm devastated, but working my way through it with the help of family and friends.
No one knows what to say, because there truly are no words.
In life, you will inevitably find yourself of both ends of grief, feeling it and observing it. Remember that it's okay to be sad, it's okay to be angry because the world is fucking cruel, but it's still okay to laugh, to smile, and remember the good times too.
The best thing you can do for those going through the pain isn't to ignore it because you "don't want to make us sad", or to tell us how sorry you are, or to send flowers. It is to share your stories, your photos, your memories - regardless of how long it's been since that person has passed away. Even years later, I promise you that pain is not gone.
The valley is looking beautiful today but it is a day of mourning for us as we have lost our beloved puppy.
It is amazing how much love and affection that little animal gave us in 4 short months.😢
Have been thinking about launching a voice-oriented discord for covid-cautious folk to come together for parallel play and chore hangs. Yet am trepidatious.
Wanting a space for companionship and mutual support, that affords space for commiseration without being dominated by it; yet avoids traps of self-satisfied superiority that seems all too common. Not sure how to pull that all off.
Suddenly realizing, this is why younger me left UU community: alienated by camaraderie around unhealed trauma.
Irony here, is that anyone who follows me knows how much verbiage have devoted to discussing need for collective acts of #mourning.
We need much better tools for processing #grief. Our society is far too quick to respond to any enactment of mourning as shameful—as disruptive to the lives of those who just want everyone else to "move on".
Yet my experience in UU was that in absence of tools to do the work of mourning, some only find communities wherein unresolved grief becomes their shibboleth.
Absent such, and absent the surrealist-fantastical ability to just pop a hinge on the scalp and pour the hard-won knowledge of how to do the work of #mourning into the head of another (such being how absolutely none of this works), am at a loss to find community with those doing that work, let alone those not doing that work.
We need better tools.
Figuring out how to realize such tools will be a community effort—hard to do when community is defined around their absence.
Yes to needing new words. (Kinda my whole shtick.)
Yes to getting off the Mishnory road!
Was contemplating naming said discord "Voice of Solaria", in part to gesture toward solarpunk. We're on the same page there, as well.
The key though is that rather than "despite", really fumbling around for "emerging of". #Mourning is a place of power: hence why our society is so very invested in keeping folk from doing that work wholeheartedly.
Poster suggest that some folk flourished during 2020—incl. someone close to them—while many others were traumatized. Implied is that those who want to still talk about covid don't recognize just how triggering events surrounding its emergence were.
As 2019 came to an end, there were two types of people: those accustomed to their life being shattered, and those for whom that would be a new experience. Pieces are still being picked up.
Am decidedly not linking to or direct quoting OP. Ain't about them.
This is about the challenge we—who want to work toward better—face as we grapple with the apparent ease with which so many have returned to #normalcy.
That apparent ease disguises profound unpreparedness to deal with anguish of loss. Both an unpreparedness to deal with that anguish in the moment, and to deal with the pain of that anguish in retrospect.
That so many welcome offer of escape… is to be expected.
This is why even before 2020, the morality play of poverty-as-bad-choices served to underwrite #EgoValue for those of #perquisitive#classposture—the #FrosteanBargain promises an unshattered life for being good.
For those denied tools to do work of #mourning, those unprepared to do hard work of #grief, a default on said social contract is world ending.
Until we—who want to work toward better—address this lack of tools for #grief, confront head on societal aversion to #mourning, we will remain tangled in #tensegrity binds.
Denial is incomplete grief. Anger at reminders of loss—unconcluded mourning. So too bargains made about when precautions ought or ought not be taken.
We must do the work of collective mourning—with utmost urgency.
The only alternative is continuing to rail against "denialism" even as fires of burning planet engulf us all.
Inability to imagine a future without that which is lost, which is only resolved when find oneself—unexpectedly—living that life that could not, at incomprehensible threshold of grief, have ever been imagined.
This National Day of #Mourning, as indigenous peoples of these lands commemorate their ancestors—including those in living memory—and speak truth of both history and future of ongoing resistance, Usian white settlers have burned carbon to honor and re-enact gluttonous dysfunctional #normalcy, willfully spreading infectious disease—in manifest emulation of their forebears, known no more deeply to them than as caricatures of myth—hastening far too many they profess to love… to status as ancestors.
Friend feels exhausted yesterday, complains of a cold, goes for a nap.
Four and a half hours later, they wake, still feeling lousy. Up a few hours, then back to bed. Wake 15 hours later. Think they have flu.
They've had confirmed #covid19 ten times now; yet #mourning#normalcy is hard work—harder all the more in society that demands we never #grieve what we've lost.
So it's a cold. It's the flu.
Yet normalcy is dead.
Yet we have yet to bury it.
We only got so many #spoons.
Mourners react next to the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, at a hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 17. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
Any ideas? I’m looking for articles, maybe even research, on the impact on grief when family members or friends die overseas & you can’t really help from Australia (or wherever you live). For instance, war zones, natural disasters, human-made disasters & the like. I can’t find anything. 🤞#grief#bereavement#mourning
"Benediction‘ tells the story of my brother and I driving to Norfolk, Neb., to bury my mother’s ashes. It’s a small farm town north of Omaha. Touché Amoré started our last tour in Nebraska, so I flew out early and made this with Chris Willmore filming and Sean Stout editing." (Jeremy Bolm)
Lyrics Extract :
"It was a sunny day in Norfolk
Next to the tree that caught your eye
I walked the ground you grew on
With my brother at my side
I'm still taking it all in
I'm adapting to this loss
People say that with time it gets easier
But I just think that they are wrong"
Touche Amore, Benediction (from Stage Four Lp, 2017)
je doute que vous ayez déjà entendu une bénédiction hurlée de la sorte :
May the lord
Mighty God
Bless and keep you forever
Grant you peace
Perfect peace
Courage in every endeavor
(c'est du scream-emo, et c'est assez génial d'avoir osé ce truc-là, cet hommage - "les gens disent qu'avec le temps ça sera plus facile, mais je pense juste qu'ils ont tort" - une sorte de refus mélancolique du deuil - qui parfois dure un temps, effectivement. Le temps du deuil précisément, est le temps du refus du deuil. Chez les mélancoliques, au sens "clinique", ce refus dure toujours. Et c'est terrible.)
"Delusional isn't quite the word to describe the characters of On The Beach—they often recognize that their behavior is irrational. Instead, I think Shute makes clear that they simply don't know how else to act."