Even When It Breaks Our Hearts

I keep dropping things. A pear I bobbled like a failed circus performer at the grocery store before it hit the floor (I bought it anyway). Cosmetics and deodorant on my vanity countertop. Cracked grey shadow like a fine dust over the cold bathroom floor tiles. I feel like I’m not completely focused lately. Almost like, if there really are planes of existence, I’ve shifted just a millimeter outside my own. Not enough for things to be truly different, but enough that, like trying to thread a needle with one eye closed, not everything seems to be lining up.

My right cheekbone and eye socket aches. Most likely the New Year’s cold I have mostly recovered from has shifted slightly to my sinuses. But it adds to that sense of unfocused ether. A Sudafed does a lot to clear that up, but the underlying unease remains.

I was trying to recall what current events I remember from my childhood. I vividly remember the Challenger exploding. I remember the yellow ribbons of Desert Storm. But I don’t feel like my childhood was informed by the nightly news. I wonder how my children will feel in 30 years. Will they have certain moments that crystalize in their memory, or will the constant news cycle mean that everything becomes less. I think sometimes my bobbling pears in the super market is directly related to the 40,000 things that I’m trying to simultaneously categorize in my mind. Family schedules. Work schedules. The ache in my eye socket may be sinus-related, or it may be potential nuclear arms race related. It’s hard to say.

Sometimes I think that the solution may be taking a break from the treadmill of current events. The world will go on turning whether I am informed each and every day or not. Taking a break from the pulsing-lights-and-throbbing-sound rave-at-midnight news style that seems to be preferred over in-depth reporting that has to be read and consumed and internalized past the second paragraph. Or past the headline, even.

And yet, the news doesn’t stop just because our heads hurt. On Friday, I checked headlines. I read a little bit about the upcoming attempt to slash and burn Obama’s last 8 years. I read about whether Trump would, after actually accepting an intelligence briefing, concede the findings of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies about Russian involvement in our election. I read an article about the end of Girl Meets World on the Disney Channel. While it’s definitely no Boy Meets World, I was a little sad that it wouldn’t continue, just because it had seemed like a nice touchpoint with simpler times. And really, Mr. Feeney was the teacher we all needed. If Corey Matthews had grown up to be Mr. Feeney, didn’t that give all of us some hope?

I did not read the article about another shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport, because I read the headline. And I basically got it. My children were on a 90-minute delay because of frigid windchills, so the morning started in a sort of relaxed pace. My program manager had replied to my “I’ll be late” text by suggesting that I just work from home. With that suggestion, I put off blow drying my hair indefinitely. I texted my husband that he didn’t have to try to cut his afternoon meeting short and hurry home after all. I’d be around for the girls after school. I took a meeting via my cell phone, mostly on mute as I put away dishes and re-loaded the dishwasher, picked up the top dozen pieces of debris from the natural disaster the week had wrought in our living room.

And then my brother texted to say he had some very bad news. Even reading that, I didn’t immediately panic. It all seems to be bad news anymore, doesn’t it? But this was different. This was, in fact, very bad news.

That headline from Fort Lauderdale, whose article I didn’t read, because I’m tired of headlines about shootings when as a society, even after Newtown, we couldn’t pass any common sense regulation, that headline — though I didn’t know it as I packed lunches and signed homework — was tragically real and close to home. Even as I shook my head and sighed and read about Disney Channel cancelations, my brother’s family was entering the kind of nightmare that seems unreal, even as the facts keep coming to support it. Olga Woltering, my sister-in-law’s warm, gregarious grandmother, my nephew’s great-grandmother, had been killed by a mass shooter. “Five killed,” doesn’t seem like such an unspeakable tragedy anymore, and if that in itself isn’t tragedy, what is. It’s become background noise. And we’re grateful it wasn’t more, in a detached sort of way. Except in this case, five people, five people in a nation of 320 million, those infinitesimal odds, turned out to be a gut-wrenching, nauseating reality.

My other brother and I work together, except that I was working from home. But because we work for a pretty great boss, my Colorado brother immediately came over, and we cried for our family’s family, for a world where things like this happen, and where we grow immune, only to unbelievably get very bad news. A world where a 90-year-old great-grandmother could end up in a headline that someone could scroll past, not truly internalizing that in fact, people who woke up today planning for a celebratory cruise, are going to bed with the bottom falling out of their world.

There are no words for that. Until the news started reporting names, I kept waiting for my brother to text back. To say that of course there had been a mistake. Because of course there had. Until there wasn’t. Until it was just as terrible as it was unbelievable.

On an article about the shooting’s victims, someone commented, “Why do we need to see this?” and I admit, I reacted entirely on instinct, hands shaking, a little cold, heart pounding up into my throat. We need to see this because these people are people, I retorted, incensed. But my retort was partly out of guilt. Because I am guilty of headline fatigue. I am guilty of not seeing each headline as a real person. As a real family. As loss and grief and weeping and years of empty photos and empty chairs and missing laughter. 

As my brother’s family travels to mourn and celebrate a life that was needlessly, pointlessly and tragically cut short, most of the nation will move on. But now I realize anew, news doesn’t exist in a bubble. Headlines may seem like a seizure-inducing rave sometimes, but to ignore them doesn’t change them. It only changes us, makes us maybe safer, maybe colder. And perhaps the point is not to avoid life’s pain, but to realize it’s what should bring us commonality and common purpose. It should inspire us to action and empathy and purpose, across partisan and geographic and generational divides. It should. It really should.

Writer and blogger Glennon Doyle Melton coined the term “brutiful.” She said, “Life is brutal. But it’s also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life’s brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can’t be separated.” Just a few days before Olga Woltering’s senseless death, I had posted a new cover photo on Facebook. For me, it was partly a coming to terms with the new year, the first year of which I can say I’m actually anxious. It was a quote from writer and theologian Frederick Buechner who himself has lived through some terrible things, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” It felt like a quote about balance, about the arc of moral justice. It felt hopeful. When I heard about Olga’s death, I nearly changed it, even as I thought about how ridiculous any thought toward my Facebook cover photo were in the circumstances. But it seemed so stupidly Zen-like, foolishly optimistic, in a world that clearly is anything but.

We can throw around terms like brutiful, and say that we won’t be afraid, and trust that there’s a higher purpose. But then a stranger walks up to your nephew’s great-grandmother and pulls a trigger. No. No, no, no, no. We don’t just get to embrace the beautiful when that happens, and zen-out the brutal. We have to live through that. Her family has to go on without her, when they shouldn’t have to. It’s utterly unfair.

In closing, I don’t have a summary paragraph. I don’t have any silver linings. I guess I just have a couple bruised pears, a tender cheekbone, a few Sudafeds in my purse and the renewed intention to not shut off. To perhaps skip articles about the shooters, but to never skip the articles about the victims. To remember that even when it gets lost in angry rhetoric, we – the all of us, we – have reason for empathy and purpose.

MacBeth was wrong. It’s not just sound and fury. It doesn’t signify nothing. It’s what we’ve got and it’s all we’ve got. We have to stop trying to go numb, shutting off and shutting down. Let’s let our hearts break. We – the all of us, we – are worth that.

Through beautiful and terrible things.