I realized I've let this blog go dark. I blame 2020 and the small fact that nobody actually reads blogs. My year was probably a lot like yours: a bit like a roller coaster, with a lot of hurtling downhill. I'm sure I don't need to expound, except that for me, the high points generally involved these two cute little people, who arrived in April and June:
I found I couldn't write last year, as things developed, and fell apart, and sometimes exploded. Silence, even in the face of growing awareness of suffering and inequity may still be very far from violence. Sometimes silence is listening. Processing. And listening sometimes takes all your energy as you reach to understand something that no one can ever completely understand--another person's suffering--through hearing their stories.
Sometimes it becomes almost impossible to listen, like when people who in face-to-face real life are thoughtful, kind, generous and decent suddenly transform into nasty trolls who bully your gentle little mom, or your kind friend down the street, or say outrageous, cruel things about an entire category of people that includes you--or doesn't. Sometimes you might have to mostly move off public social media to more private forums, like family group chats on WhatsApp, because the way things are being said these days you can't listen to so closely or so often anymore and stay mentally OK.
Even so, with that little distance, if you really listen past the bluster and rants, underneath it all you can hear a silent story about hurting, anxiety, hopelessness. Even grief. Anger is always a secondary emotion.
Grief you recognize, because you're human and yes, humans suffer.
Some of the stories that moved me most this year were little grief-stories that people close to me or to people I love took the time to sit down and write out. One of these was my daughter's physician-assistant friend in Brooklyn who kept a diary of everything she was experiencing during the early horror of the pandemic in New York.
And my friend, Mika, one of the kindest, cheeriest, most generous people I know, who on Black-out Day instead of sitting silent, wrote out a list of hurts and abuses she and her family regularly suffer here in my very-white community and wherever she goes, because her skin happens to be dark.
And my healthy little sister, who got a "mild" case of COVID last February that turned into a still-ongoing case of COVID involving significant heart and lung problems, and she still isn't fully well, but who keeps cheering me through my own ongoing bout with COVID, and who took the time to write out a summary of her year, which, when I read it, made me cry.
Well, I cried for all them.
Stories are empathy machines, as Neil Gaiman says.
Through all the insanity of 2020 I almost forgot about an essay I wrote a few years ago and which I submitted to a contest early last year and won, until the editor of the magazine contacted me in November and said it was finally going to print. I did the final edits in the middle of my worst COVID brain fog. When the essay came out just last month in BYU Studies magazine, I was in the middle of rereading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (really, depressing Russian novels do help stave off depression), which reminded me that reading about someone else's suffering can sometimes help relieve our own. The empathy factor is powerful.
And suddenly, I really wanted to share my thoughts on grief with all of you, the people I love, and strangers, too, in case it makes you feel better. Maybe nobody will find it. I mean, who reads blogs? But I wanted to send something positive out into the universe. A small gift. Breaking my 2020 silence.
So, here's my little offering: my essay, "Peace Offering," about my son's brain surgery and a dove I once ran over with my car.
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