#325

p.347:

https://books.google.com/books?id=w-jfXz9T_2cC&pg=PA336&lpg=PA336&dq=Penniless,+ill,+abroad,+Henry+lay+skew+to+Henry's+American+fate,+which+was+to+be+well&source=bl&ots=eJA1mJjHUt&sig=pXY-EkReFzq0TeZaLih0xWC0pG4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMImZnOz7SGyQIVTvpjCh1XAwGp#v=onepage&q=Penniless%2C%20ill%2C%20abroad%2C%20Henry%20lay%20skew%20to%20Henry's%20American%20fate%2C%20which%20was%20to%20be%20well&f=false

There is so much to grieve about. The state of the world: Politically: Murderous, mass murderous organizations in Africa and the Middle East. War, continuous war, killing hundreds of thousands of unlucky noncombatant people. Ecologically: The oceans are dying, the great forests are still being razed, the planet is heating up and we still burn the oil that heats it, the great animals are being slaughtered. The rise and establishment of public ignorance: Education undermined, health care hijacked, guns and gun culture and gun use running rampant, public bigotry and hatred gain public acceptance. The aggrandizement of the power of wealth. Anyone paying attention to the world of 2015 knows all of this, and plenty more. A societal and globalized grief is then appropriate. These situations differ in scope from the private grief when a friend or loved one dies. Then, grief is acute. We cry. Either we can’t sleep or we can’t stay awake. Our physical bodies falter under the weight of acute grief. Eventually, we heal. There are scars, maybe even debilitating scars, so we are never the same. But we heal and mostly move on. World grief is chronic. It pulls and drags, it undermines our vision of our marvelous lives on our marvelous planet. It takes strength, faith, and a kind of psychological nimbleness to cope and live the engaged, fulfilling life that is our birthright. But there are many days when the anxiety of public grief drags at our feet and we trip.

We’re meant to “hope forward” into the future, but B. is correct here, grief splits us and turns us around. Our hopeful, yearning future-making selves falter and we advance backwards into the past: I made so many mistakes. I didn’t love enough. I could have been a better friend/parent/child/spouse. I could have treated myself better, and now I’m dying. So much is lost. But B. is writing about acute grief. Maybe we only advance backwards into a regret-filled past, and then we ebb, decline and peter out. It happens. We never recover. But acute grief more often dissipates after a time. Suddenly we’re gazing forward again and didn’t even realize it.

It’s the chronic, ceaseless drag of world grief that I worry more about. It splits us too, so that we look backwards and forwards at once, grieve and hope at once, like a double-exposure, a wedding and a funeral superimposed in the same frame: Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband for as long as you both shall live? I (rest in peace) do.

The only way, I’ve decided, to fade the superimposed image of back-dragging chronic grief is to do something about it. Knowing all the while that you can’t change the world. It’s too big, and your efforts won’t matter. If a storm washes a hundred thousand starfish onto the beach, you can’t save all the starfish. When you start throwing them back to the water, a cynic may remind you that it won’t make a difference. Your efforts won’t calm the mighty ocean, and all your work won’t matter to the dying, drying starfish piled on the sand. It’ll matter to this one, is the response, and to this one. More important, though—rescuing what starfish you can rescues you. You can’t save the world by yourself. You don’t have to. Doing whatever you can is enough.