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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

grief

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When a sanctuary becomes a memorial

One of the memorial signs outside the Pulse nightclub, Orlando, Florida.
A memorial sign outside of Pulse, Orlando, FL. Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie

Nearly six months ago, the Latinx and LGBTQ communities in Orlando, FL, reeled. A gunman had killed 49 people and wounded more at Pulse, a local club and sanctuary. A fiftieth casualty died from his injuries on September 11, and the grief is still both raw and dense for many.

The city of Orlando installed a new perimeter fence around Pulse earlier this fall, wrapping the shell of the sanctuary in memorial art from local creatives. The building is completely surrounded: affirmations and printed drawings, roughly photocopied pictures and framed portraits. Stickers are peeling and flowers have dried. Candle wax pooled and melted long ago, and the building stands silent.

During our group’s meetings today, Rev. Rodney McKenzie said, “People aren’t symbolically dying. They’re actually dying. And we’re accountable to them. They are us.”

That’s why we, and at least four other parties of people we did not know, gathered at Pulse this afternoon. We read the names of the dead and prayed together. We recommitted to the emergence of a world in which the seeds of mass murder can’t take root, sprout, or bear toxic fruit among us.

Violence turned our sanctuary into a memorial. And six months of community witness, affirmation, prayer, and commitment is carving the sacred back into that place.

Blessings to every family.

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Welcome company

The density of bad news is such that we can say a place name, and, just like that, the name conjures up for us the entire tableau of suffering that unfolded there.

Columbine. 

Virginia Tech.

Aurora.

Ferguson.

Maybe we say a person’s name instead.

Islan Nettles. 

Jessie Hernandez. 

John Crawford.

Sandra Bland.

In the last two weeks, there have been so many.

Orlando.

Istanbul.

Dhaka.

Dallas.

Dylan Noble, Fresno, June 25.

Essence Bowman, Sulphur City, July 2.

Pedro Villanueva, Fullerton, July 3.

Alton Sterling, Baton Rouge, July 5.

Philando Castile, Falcon Heights, July 6.

We should not need to share a culture, skin color, religion, or system of government with another human being to mourn their loss. All people suffer at the hands of endless war, as do our planet and our sense of common humanity, and all people deserve peace.” —Aniqa Raihan

After the massacre at Pulse in Florida, I said I didn’t want to feel like I had to trudge through grief alone. And I haven’t.

People directly affected have stepped up. People not directly affected have stepped up. Friends who’ve doubted whether to call or what to say have reached out anyway. Therapists and counselors and chaplains have offered free sessions for individuals and grief-processing circles for groups. Activists have set up healing events so that people who can’t usually access support can.

Humans are being humane. We need more of that.

I appreciated Erica Joy’s meditation on grieving while at work.

And Believe Out Loud’s affirmation of faith strong enough to bear despair.

Even Adventist administrators in this part of the world are wrestling with all the violence and the racism that has birthed it.

We must move beyond the talking stage and begin to actually develop practical ways of dealing with racial intolerance in all of its forms — whether subtle or overt… Now is the time for our local congregations, for our state and regional conferences, for our educational and medical institutions to pray together, to engage in creative thinking together, and then to work together to strengthen what we have in common and bring the hope and healing compassion of Jesus to our communities.” —Daniel R. Jackson and G. Alexander Bryant

We need one another’s company right now, not just to support each other through the emotional turmoil, but also to co-build material, institutional alternatives to surveillance, strife, and slaughter.

It’s beyond “not passing by on the other side of the road,” and beyond simply attending to others’ mid-crisis pain. Claiming each other as neighbors and siblings means going deeper and being determined, despite criticism and fear, to stay there.

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Grieving

A solid black rectangle -- no other colors or shapes.

When I’m grieving, as I am today, words are hard and all I can do is feel.

I’ve been reading James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and thinking about the fact that spaces we create to live lives without self-monitoring or code-switching or defense-strategizing are only as safe as the world around us allows them to be.

Black people have historically made churches, clubs, and their own homes refuges from the wider world. They’ve been spaces for survival and solidarity, for recovering from suffering, and for imagining what life without oppression could be like. Those spaces have always been at the mercy of others with more mob force, more Molotovs, or more firepower.

Historically, LGBTQ people have formed our own faith groups and made sanctuaries within the sanctuary. We’ve created social gathering places where, even if only for a few hours, we don’t have a steady background drone of unimaginative heterosexism. We’ve determined the norms and monitored the boundaries. We’ve nourished ourselves, told our own histories, and remembered kin that the wider world would rather forget.

All of these spaces have always been at the mercy of others who have the legal authority to arrest, or build a panic defense to protect them in court, or wave a ministerial license that shields them from criticism of their words and their policies.

In the midst of all that, I’m thinking about the basic formula of Black spiritual music: hope despite despair. Our people face real and deep despair, yet something calls them to discharge their distress through the blues and encourage each other with spirituals and sacred stories.

They comfort each other. They resist together however they can. I don’t know how they make it. Many of them don’t; most of them don’t. But some of them do, and, though besieged and traumatized, they become my ancestors.

They become part of that cloud of witnesses across centuries and continents that teaches me tragedy is a theme in the book of life, but it isn’t the whole book. Even when we’re forbidden to read or denied the authority to officiate community rites, we still create whole worlds within the world, worlds on the margins, worlds on the internet, worlds in literature—worlds where we can gather, and be, and where our community helps us to remember: we aren’t prey.

I want to be a part of spiritual communities that are on the right side of this story, that aren’t colluding through actions or sermons or silence with the ideologies that make us prey. I want to be part of spiritual and social communities that are actively creating room for us to be, to grow, to flourish.

I don’t have that right now. A lot of us don’t have it.

Times like this are when I feel the absence of it. Sabbaths after a church shooting, services after a club massacre: these are the times when I want to be among people whose spirituality can touch the substance of my life, whose programs aren’t so ordered that they leave whole human beings out.

I send my love to the families and friends of the community at Pulse and I honor the power of their lives. As we learn their legal names, I hope locals will also tell their stories. Because sometimes, this is an exhausting world, and we need to witness each other however we can.

If you consider yourself a friend or ally of LGBTQ people, reach out. We also need our friends to reach out before tragedy.

We need our friends to respond at family gatherings, to cut off antagonistic gossip among peers, to engage folks at the church, synagogue, and mosque, to respond clearly and without equivocation when politicians and other public figures promote Othering, to help us tear down every civic and ideological barrier to human flourishing.

We need our friends to choose that path before tragedy.
After tragedy, when we can perceive more than grief, that’s the path we’ll be on, and I don’t want us to be on it alone.

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On Dodging Grief

My friend J Mase III, poet, writer, and co-founder of the weekly #qfaith Twitter chat, wrote an article about grief this week. He’d asked his followers about how others react to grief, what they say, and what we wish others said.

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine died. We met at our church 4 years ago; he was an usher and deacon, and his wife often sat in our row. The two of them were and are among the sweetest and most grounded people I know; easy-going, open-hearted, travel-lovers, and wonderfully matched as a couple. While she recovered from breast cancer, he developed a terminal disease, underwent a series of conventional and experimental treatments, and then, about a week and a half ago, went to sleep and never woke.

We all knew it was coming. We just didn’t know when. We saw his suits hanging more loosely around his shoulders and a shadow form in his cheeks—but it was easy to deny impending death because he so thoroughly distracted us with a life that he lived the hell out of. His smile was perennial and his capacity for graciousness, kindness, and other-centeredness was undimmed by either declining health or increasing pain.

I can’t imagine anyone who knew him and won’t miss him. I also don’t know anyone who knew him who’s not glad he’s now beyond the reach of cancer.

Grief is a sneaky thing at times like this. Mainstream culture gives us a straightforward protocol for grief: for family, you get this much time to deny, cry, or pout. With friends, that much. For people with whom you had a social network in common, maybe a little. With celebrities like Nelson Mandela or Paul Walker, follow the news cycle without being maudlin, and then move on.

Who makes up these rules? They don’t fit for me. They don’t match my relationships and I don’t live by them.

Shame and belonging researcher Brené Brown has a gift for explaining how our responses to the vulnerabilities of others can open up our relationships or abridge them. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) animated part of a talk on empathy in which she describes how sympathy falls short, can be dismissive, and is often about assuaging the discomfort of the speaker rather than the person in grief, sadness, or pain:

One of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that’s very difficult, I’d rather you say, “Phew! I don’t even know what to say right now; I’m just so glad you told me.”

Because the truth is rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection. —Brené Brown

So here are 5 things I told J that I wished folk said when I was grieving:

“I don’t know what to say, so I’m going to be quiet. I love you.”

“I’ll only tell you my grief story if you ask—and you don’t have to.”

“Wanna play some pool? Can pick you up at 8.”

“Doesn’t matter that you’re not grieving a relative. It doesn’t hurt any less.”

“You can feel whatever you feel around me. I’m listening.”

Sometimes, I said, people fill the silences and the space with their noise, awkwardness, and fear-projected-outward, missing opportunities to just be. Not everyone can stand the light of vulnerability or loss or hope, and so when they can’t, yet show up in your space anyway, managing them while managing your own grief becomes an unnecessary and burdensome mission.

There are also some who can stand that light, who can bear it, who will sit with others through sadness without fixing, meddling, or minimizing. Are they rare souls? Does it matter?

I appreciate those I know. And I hope this year to be more of one for the people around me.

Check out J’s article at the Huffington Post: Rules for grieving in the New Year—or Grieving like it’s 1999. What grieving rules or customs do you live by? Share in the comments below.