MY WEEKEND PLAN IS MOURNING
How to stop moving when the world doesn't.
We are all children. We are all dying. Or, to put it another way (which is to say, to tell the truth): we are all someone's child. We will die someday. We are always someone's child, but we are not always children— because we are all dying, but until we are dead, we are living, and we are supposed to keep living until we are not children anymore. A child is dead, and he should be alive. A child with a face so familiar that all I feel when I see them is love, love, love—that child who reminds me of the baby I haven't had yet— that child was murdered. He was murdered and this is what I am afraid of: children, dying.
Excerpt from Emory O’Malley’s LAMENTATION (2024)
Last week, Edward Holmes of Buffalo was shot and killed in a “suicide by cop” attack, in which police officers escalated the situation and fired 20 rounds at the 58-year-old armed Black man.
With her hands in my mouth, my dental hygenist told me that she wept on Wednesday watching a Palestinian man describe losing his entire family when the Israeli Occupation Forces bombed the friend’s home where they’d sought refuge. He was told they would be safe.
When I came home from work Thursday, my husband asked me to read over a poem he had written in honor of Nex Benedict, and I held back tears thinking about their beautiful head, beaten against a cold school bathroom floor.
Friday, I woke up thinking about Aaron Bushnell, his final cry to the world being a selfless one, a desperate one, a cry that echoes the ones I hear all around me in this heartbreaking world.
Today, I went to a vigil for those murdered by the IOF in the Flour Massacre and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. My throat is raw from the calls for ceasefire, from all the times over the nearly 150 days of Israel’s attacks that we have cried out for an end to the occupation of Palestine.
Tommorrow, I’ll go to a memorial with other transmasculine people to mourn our little brother, Nex— to mourn all of the elders and peers and little siblings who should be here and aren’t because transphobia has been allowed to sink its teeth into legislature nationwide. Some cisgender people are comfortable making sure we are likely to die, and still others are comfortable giving our persecutors a place in the capitol, on the school board, and at their dinner tables. They make room for their bigotry at the expense of our lives, and they turn away when the consequences of their actions are deadly serious.
A week from now, our local art museum will open an exhibition centered around the Buffalonians who lost their lives when a white supremacist drove hours to hunt them down— an armed white supremacist who was removed from Tops unscathed by the same police department that killed Mr. Holmes.
Through all of this, I ask my body for more space to hold the grief, and the space opens up within me. When there is no communion with other mourners, when I make the great mistake to act the drama as if I were alone, that space can feel vacuous. To avoid being pulled in to despair, I dedicate time to the sadness, to the people around me who are also grieving. We open our hearts to more love, more grief, more discontentment, and I am shocked by how much we can hold without breaking when the hands are many and there is enough time.
The American political machine loves to hand out breadcrumbs to the few to separate them from the many who are still hungry. See how Biden has flipped a switch on abortion to placate his constituency while ignoring the comparable attacks on bodily autonomy waged on transgender people of all ages across the nation. See how diversity pledges became dusty scraps of paper with no action to follow; how incarcerated people still live and die in prison with no view of freedom; how Black people are still harrased murdered police; how legacies of enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, and discrimination have been all but completley ignored. See how amid climate crisis, our so-called “representatives” okay more fossil fuel pipelines and tell their constituents they should be grateful they participated in passing the Inflation Reduction Act. We have to stop accepting the crumbs. We have to demand more, and demand it together.
The roots of the word “together” come from Proto-Germanic for "in a body," and from the Proto-Indo-European *ghedh- “to unite, join, to make a bond”. This conveys more than proximity. Togetherness requires intention to join together, to become one body, to unite. My friend Alice Yaser spoke about revolution last week to a group of 300 people demanding an end to New York’s bankrolling of genocide and the Israeli settler project. On the topic of cultivating resistance within the belly of the beast, she says “we must use our most valuable armament: unity”. Fighting together, grieving together, living together— this is the only way to ensure that we will be victorious together.
This world will break your heart. I know it has broken mine. We are not meant to hold our grief alone. If the world does not stop for our grief, our collective grief might have the power to stop the world by reflecting back to it the horror of this particular moment, by slowing the unfolding tragedy. Like the conifers that only seed with fire, like the mussel that must be broken open to become food for the otter, like all other good things of use that must not stay closed forever, maybe our hearts are meant to break so that what spills out can unite us.
May we mourn together.
May we fight together.
May we win liberation together.
I heard this on NPR in the car earlier this week: Asian elephants carry away their dead calves, loudly mourning them before burying them, a just-published study found. Their herds avoid the burial site even during migration, finding alternate routes of travel. How comforting to see this familiar grief ritual in another animal species and know humans are not alone in this.
- wrote about living and dying for liberation in this essay:
Everyone should read this excerpt in particular:
“If you want people to live, then the best, most useful, helpful thing you can do is ACT and figure out what your role is in contributing to the safety & survival of people & our ecosystems, including those that are most oppressed…
You want people to not kill themselves? Help tangibly build a world that gives people the right to live. Fight like hell for collective liberation. Think about what work you need to do to let go of the illusions keeping you tethered to the values of the empire like success, independence, self-indulgent self-centered self-care, self-obsession, self-optimization, productivity for the sake of self-advancement. Stop climbing the ladder to hell.”
Thank you for reading! Feel free to share this publication or any part that resonates with you.🧡🧡 Jo
