Keen In: It’s Time We Express Our Collective Grief

“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul.” — Francis Weller

It’s mourning in America.

But where’s the grief?

Depending on the talking head you listen to, between 1,500 and 2,500 of us are dying each day. And that’s just from COVID-19.

That daily death toll doesn’t include “excess deaths”—the thousands more dying each day across the country from indirect effects of the pandemic.

Nor does it include the countless numbers of our fellow Americans who die each day from heart disease, cancer, suicide, drug overdose, car accidents, mass shootings, homicide, and the myriad other unnatural causes that extinguish thousands of lives in this country each and every day.

And this is just in America. It’s 3 pm Pacific and globally, over 100,000 people have died today, a number that goes up by one every fraction of a second.

The collective daily loss of life each day is staggering.

That much of it preventable or at the very least could be mitigated and substantively reduced is a colossal loss in and of itself.

That much of it goes unreported — and thus unnoticed, unacknowledged, unfelt by us — or gets buried in depersonalized, dehumanized aggregate statistics disconnected from the lives they represent is yet another tragic loss.