A grief conspiracy throughout time

I often wonder why we don’t run around and shake people screaming: we just went through a pandemic!!

It feels like most people have forgotten. In the TV show The Leftovers, the world is thrown astray because one day a random blip disappears 2% of the global population. And the people left behind just have to cope somehow.

HBO’s The leftovers= sort of like the Avengers.

Many people choose to move on. One group, however, walks around organizing protests where their sole purpose is just to remind others of the people that got blipped away. They don’t want people to stop asking, why the f aren’t we addressing the fact that this random fucking thing happened?

Even though that group is obviously a cult, I really related to this urge, this need to alert people. I understand it’s a healthy person thing to “move on.” But if you lose someone or something you love, and someone you love dies, how can someone put it aside? What I’m really asking is, to anyone who is trying to move on, what’s wrong with you people.

I was in a grief group over zoom and the counselor said something that annoyed me: This drive to scream in people’s faces, has existed for everyone throughout all of time. In its most recognizable form it’s driven by things that aren’t related to one person’s death. It’s climate change, genocide, homelessness. Everyone’s got a reason or multiple to stand in the middle of a Costco and scream “Wake up SHEEPLE”

When the counselor made that connection between me and people who seem crazy for other reasons, I felt annoyed. People like to say that we can grieve many things. Like you lose ur parent, but also you can lose your job or your car or your spot in the line at the grocery store and on and on and on.

However when something is too many things it tends to become nothing and what I mean by that is, I have no idea what the word grief means anymore.

But the counselor hit on something true for me, that grieving things can look just like… having a cause to fight for. This can be sort of comforting.

At first it kinda seems like it’s okay to let grief guide us. It does seem that plenty of these crazy mourning people have gotten things done. It seems like all those history people have tapped into that well. Like Greta Thunberg? That girl is grieving.

Greta has requested not to be referenced in my writing so often. Sorry greta.

Feeling that pang makes making life decisions so much harder, not just because it’s painful. But because Grieving makes you feel so alive. When I’ve felt sadness after loss, I hadn’t known before that humans could feel so much. When you do feel it, that crazy thing, how can we not allow it to lead our lives and never let go? When it’s the most visceral thing we’ve ever felt?

To think of it as grief being that crazy thing that everyone feels that makes you want to throw your life away or scrap and start anew, and be more focused—this is BIG, people, let’s not ignore it.

Join a cult of grieving today.

I feel honored to have felt something so large. I reject anything smaller than the size of grief.