The Mourning After

When the executive director of an organization I worked with fell deathly ill and was lying in a coma in a nearby hospital, his associate director asked me what he should do. I was puzzled by this, first, that he would need to ask someone and, second, that he would ask me. I was standing with him in their long conference room with the furniture donated from a local bank and the grimy windows that looked out over an even grimier street. I’d been in that room a hundred times helping with one project or another so I guess I was a trusted person but that didn’t mean I would know what to do.

In the offices down the hall from the conference room and in the warren of rooms downstairs, staff members were seeing clients, people who were homeless or whose utilities had been cut off. Maybe they were being evicted tomorrow or the County was threatening to take their kids. The work there was always urgent and this day was no different. Except that it was. The heartache burned like incense. I could smell it from the street.

“I’m not sure what you should do but I don’t think you go on with your day as if he’s not in the hospital and maybe dying. The people here love him. They have to be really sad.”

He sat down in the worn swivel chair, leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Then he told the story of when his daughter was in the hospital after surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor and how he would look out the window of her room at the people on the street and the cars driving past and wonder how they could all be having a normal day when this terrible thing was happening to his little girl.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot the past few days. How everyone goes about their business. All these people being shot – not just in Las Vegas but everywhere, everyday – and we barely miss a beat. We were back to ‘fake news’ and the controversy about the Secretary of State calling the President a moron before they were done power-washing the bloodied sidewalks in Las Vegas. I get that. Life goes on. But if I was the mother of a murdered person or a wife or sister, I’d be looking out the window wondering how people could be having a normal day. I’m picking out a casket but the rest of the world has moved on.

My advice was to close the agency for a few hours, call a meeting in the chapel of the hospital, find a pastor, and do some praying. And that’s what he did. I went to the chapel and sat next to a colleague who was holding his head in his hands. People need this, I thought, I need this. We need to see everyone hurting. We need this not to be a normal day; we need it to be an exceptional day, a sad day, and be in that grief and hope wholeheartedly. That’s what tragedy requires.

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Photo by Alberto Lucas Pérez on Unsplash