"It's not my grief," I tell myself. It wasn't my child. Why am I shaking? Why is my head so hot? Why am I crying, silent streams etching lines of salt onto my cheeks?
My friend's son was a victim of horrible violence. I was scrolling Instagram and saw a photo of a small arm with a hospital band. I assumed he was sick. I read the caption. Rykelan wasn't sick. He was dying. He was killed.
Instantly I can feel the gaping black hole where Sam's heart beats, pumps blood to a body that is trapped in a horrible crystallized moment in time. I stare at the screen. I scroll through the photos of a four year old boy's smiling face. I wonder, how can anyone hurt a child like this?
"Why don't you cry over the children dying in Palestine?" my mind asks. I push it away. Because I do cry over the children dying in Palestine. Every morning I wake up and count the minutes until I feel angry at my government for being a farce of democracy. For being a capitalist war machine wrapped up in bulletproof 200-year old parchment. For supplying bombs and munitions that slaughter innocent families including children with smiling faces just like Rykelan's.
It reminds me of Elan, who I met one time. His partner Dakotah and I follow each other on Instagram and didn't realize we were both in northeast Ohio - and both journalists for the same publication. She came over to my booth and we jumped up and down and hugged and did that shrill excited noise that we do. Elan (pronounced to rhyme with swan, not like Elon Musk) talked to my partner about music while Dakotah and I talked at Gilmore Girls speeds. Brennan followed him on Spotify, listened to his songs, and was impressed. "He's really good," he told me. He could taste the rap influences. I wish I had listened too. Even though I never would have tasted the rap influences.
We never made plans or met up, and I wish we had. I could say "We never got a chance," but life is just a bunch of chances strung together. The reality is that I assumed they'd be here forever. I assumed we could meet up, grab dinner and drinks, talk about music and writing at any time in the future.
Then Elan was gone. My partner and I went to the memorial service, and it was PACKED. Full of people who knew Elan from his Twitch streams or his music or his advocacy work.
"Why are you crying so hard?" my mind asked me as I listened to person after person take the mic and share a story about Elan, put something on the altar for Elan, pour out a shot for Elan. "This is not your grief."
An average of 150,000 people die every day across the globe. The fact that we KNOW THAT means that we are a global community, we are a planet full of people. But we also cannot possibly hold all the empathy and love and loss it would take to grieve them, can we? Are we supposed to?
Can't we, somehow?
I know that my empathy is enormous. But it was more than empathy that tore my heart open when Elan died, when Rykelan died. It's a huge, growing avalanche of grief that I haven't fully witnessed and allowed to pass, built up over a lifetime of letting out grief in controlled pressure-cooker release valve bursts. It's knowing that babies as innocent and perfect and precious as Rykelan are being blown up in tents in Rafah with bombs my taxes paid for. It's knowing that brilliant musicians and beloved partners are struggling with untold depths of mental illness. It's finding out my stepdad was terminally ill by a coincidence because my mom kept it a secret on purpose for months.
It's George Floyd. It's Breonna Taylor. It's Eric Garner. It's Tamir Rice. It's Philando Castile. It's Alton Sterling. It's Botham Jean. It's Elijah McClain. It's Emmett Till.
It's my childhood best friend's dad telling me on Facebook that he's on life support long enough to donate his organs and the weight of my five-year-old-self's grief at losing that first love. Even at his funeral, I thought, "This is not my grief." I hadn't spoken to him in years, besides exchanging "Happy Birthdays," so how could it hit me that hard?
It's the elderly woman across the street who hadn't checked her mail in a few days, so I went to check on her. She'd been on the floor for days, and it took me a couple more to convince her to go to the hospital. All she wanted was to go home and she was so angry with me for not busting her out of the rehab home. In the end, she contacted her estranged family and made peace with her brothers before she died.
It's being estranged from my parents and having to grieve the care and love I deserved, keeping my distance for my survival and safety, knowing that to the world's other orphans I have a treasure worth a thousand lifetimes but that I can never go back to being loved in a way that hurts me.
To be human is to grieve. To be human is to change, and to lose, and to feel it all.
"It's not my grief" is an impossible belief.
It is. It is your grief.
It's our grief.
Links to Support Grieving Families: