Aftermath

Hardliners - Holcombe Waller (mp3)

Let's imagine you and your family just crawled out of your nuclear shelter, having hunkered down in that space since the Cuban Missile Crisis. That's about the only way you could live in America and not know the name Joe Paterno.


What unfolded at Penn State University this past week -- over the past decade, actually -- has created a level of debate and discussion that football fanatics, detractors, or apathetic sideliners can jump in with both feet. The drama involves the destroyed innocence of children, the abuse of power, a well-known sports figure, and the world ending because of a whimper rather than a bang.

The perceived male mentor turned predator of boys -- unspeakable.

The downward-trending descriptions as the event went up the chain of command, from "rape" to "inappropriate contact" to "horseplay" -- uncanny.

The image of thousands of intelligent college students in a mild riot not because of children being victimized, but because of hero worship -- unthinkable.

But what's worth remembering this morning is that, alongside this quiet and slow-developing horror story is a another old as Whoville and the Grinch: the tale of what happens to a community when bad shit lands on the doorstep.

On Saturday, roughly 107,000 people -- a record crowd -- crammed into Beaver Stadium and locked arms. Every player, coach and staffer from both Penn State and Nebraska huddled in the middle of the field to pray. The level and potency of the collective grief was stunning to view, even from a living room in Tennessee.

The cynic could complain that everything was too carefully choreographed, that the entire scene was arranged by propagandists and marketing teams hired to improve a rock bottom opinion of all things Nittany Lion while also warming the confused and hurting hearts of its students, fans and alumni.

Maybe so. Maybe most modern pop music and everything my children encounter on TeenDisney or TeenNick is scientifically crafted by entire groups of songwriters to elicit specific emotional responses. But sometimes an event deserves and requires us to move a step beyond our cynicism.

Watching people of all ages mourning a flood of different issues was powerful regardless of whether the scenario was manufactured. The end of an era, the loss of innocence, the confusion and frustration that a string of events with only one clearcut no good terribly awful person could bring down a legend and possibly a program. But at least everyone in that stadium were in the same place, feeling the same things, in a communal way.

From national events like September 11 to local events like the tragic death of a student. Aftermath is a powerful, magnetic force. That it pulls us together doesn't make it a good thing, but in dark times, we reach and hunger for the tiniest bits of light we can muster.

For all the heavy judgment and debates going on like a hurricane around and inside the Penn State campus, and when the light is hard to come by, at least huddling together in the darkness provides some warmth.

Everyone deserves a little of that.

The Afternoon of Mourning

Every Devil - Tanya Donelly (mp3)
Wish You Well - Katie Herzig (mp3)

It’s 6:10 a.m. I’m in the kitchen with my mother. I’m 6 years old. I’m eating one of the Monster Cereals for breakfast. Probably Count Chocula. Mom is pouring another cup of coffee before we head to the car for another day of school. Then, in the midst of the mildly frantic hubbub, she stops. The world stops with her. She’s staring into the blackness of the window, swept into a different dimension far away from me, from the kitchen, from that present moment.

She’s thinking about my biological father. Her brain has called up some memory -- a passionate kiss, or an intense fight, or some random moment where their fingers grazed one another as they reached for the salt shaker at the same time, whatever -- and she has fallen into that well of grief where her mind still struggles to accept that he’s dead.

This is fiction. I made it up.

I don’t have a specific memory of a specific morning from a specific childhood age. What I do have is a jumble of memories of seeing my mother stare off into the distance, yanked out of body and out of that moment, spaced out and incapable of communicating. And I have the wisdom and experience of age now, enough to realize she was mourning her dead husband, enough to realize she almost never let me in on this secret for fear of it having some undesirable consequence on my own childhood.

As I continue my all-too-rapid approach to midlife, I’ve learned it’s not just my mom who has these lost spells. We all do at some point. Once we’ve encountered a tragedy or event too powerful for us to simply swallow and process, our minds will occasionally pull us away from reality and force us to continue digesting the meaning and consequence of a lost loved one, or a divorce, or a tornado ripping our house to shreds, or a serious car accident.

If I learned one seriously painful and life-altering lesson from the death of my adopted father, it’s that we place far too much cultural emphasis on “being there” for someone immediately following a tragedy, and far too little on being there later. When we’re in shock and reeling from a life-altering event, we find our head buzzing, our bodies in a sort of vertigo, and we’re surrounded by concerned people and covered dishes. But later, when the shock has worn off, and the mundane repetitive nature of our lives has been fully restored, and that grief yanks us away from our daily existence for a minute or a day or a week, we feel alone and forgotten. No covered dish. No concerned visitors. No sympathy cards.

Because we’re supposed to be better. We’re supposed to have healed. We had our time to mourn, and now it’s way past time to have moved on.

There might be no lonelier and more heartbreaking thing to say, to oneself or someone else, than “It’s time to move on.” If you don’t believe me, go rewatch Ghost.

The tornado that tore through our Southeast and the outpouring of concern and care that has overflowed in its wake has been truly amazing, but it’s also important to remember that rebuilding for most victims of such an event doesn’t happen overnight. It takes weeks, months, even years. It’s true of tornadoes, and it’s true of tragedy in general.

My point is this. Think of someone you know -- anyone, really -- who has lost a loved one. Be it the death of a parent from old age or cancer, or a sibling, or a child. It can even be someone who went through a rough divorce. Think of that person in your head.

Now, right now, no matter how long ago that tragic moment occurred, think about writing them a letter, by hand, telling them that they’re on your mind. (You can add in a little religious seasoning to taste if you lean that way, but it’s not necessary.)

Tell them they are on your mind and your heart. Tell them you know, from your own experiences, that we might not ever fully heal from the tragedies we survive, but maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Tell them that you admire them for how very well they’ve seemed to manage, and even though there’s probably nothing you can do, you’re thinking of them and there if they need anything.

Yes, it’s possible your note will make that person cry. It’s possible you’ll be picking an emotional scab that was better left all crusty, and if that’s the case, I apologize to the both of you. But I can tell you by name the two people who have reached out to me at completely unexpected and random times, and I can tell you I remember their act of concern and kindness a bajillion times more intensely than I remember those covered dishes and those hugs of sympathy at the visitation.

It never hurts to know someone is thinking of you.

What's Tragic

"O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions."

--Shakespeare


Vic Chestnutt--"Sponge" (mp3)
Vic Chestnutt--"Where Were You" (mp3)

Sometimes the tragedies of the world become so overwhelming that I don't know what to do, don't what to think, don't know how to process. I mean, I'm just looking around right now, at photographs and videos, at maps, at a smattering of news stories, at email exchanges, even at distasteful jokes that are already surfacing, and I really cannot conceive of a single action that I should take. Checking in in that American, Internet way in Japan, in the Middle East, in South America, in Mexico, I am frozen.

It feels to me like the entire world is frozen. Okay, maybe not frozen, just wading through jello. Countries, even. Countries like ours know how to throw money, troops, resources, food, or pretty much anything else at a problem, but that's just it--we throw it. Much of the time, we throw whatever it is away. We seem to mobilize too slowly, too late. It doesn't get where it should go. It doesn't accomplish what it is supposed to.
Our country reminds me of the communication system that is much of the problem in the book (and film) Black Hawk Down. In trying to steer a convoy through Mogadishu to a helicopter crash site, an airplane flying overhead relays directions to a command helicopter flying beneath who then tells the lead vehicle in the convoy which way to turn. By the time the convoy gets the message, they have missed the turn they were supposed to make, make a later turn on command, and then get even more lost.

We are so wrapped up in the political ramifications of what we do that we cannot mobilize efficiently anywhere. You may think that I am referring to a particular, unnamed situation. I am not. I am merely staring on screens and phones at the latest round of tragedies.

A friend and I were sitting at lunch today, trying to work through our job frustrations and he asked me what we should do. I gave him the same answer that I gave a different friend at lunch yesterday: "We should do the best job that we can and then go home."

I know that is not particularly insightful or brilliant. I don't even know if I believe it.

But in this mini-society that we work in here, even if we could fix the problems that enter or affect our respective realms, there would still be so many beyond our grasp that I doubt that we would find much satisfaction from our small victories. We would either see each solution opening a new set of problems or we might look past the ones that affect us the most to the ones are even larger, even more systemic. Maybe I'm wrong. I also suspect it's pretty much the same everywhere. Maybe I'm wrong about that, too.

After two lunches like this, as kind of a half-joke, I sent my two lunch friends "The Serenity Prayer." You know how it goes:

The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

--Reinhold Niebuhr

It offers sound, if generalized, advice. Its opening statement is as powerful as it gets, were it only possible to know how to figure out the difference between those two parts of our lives. Certainly, wisdom worth asking for. That prayer, with its fixed gaze toward the next life, was to have been a nod to Billy's post yesterday as well.

But it got blocked from delivery by the school's firewall. "The Serenity Prayer." Blocked as spam.

I know that should be funny and ironic. But it hit me differently. It felt more like this layer of cyber-protection was yet another way that we are being controlled into inactivity, that the efforts to maintain what we have make us feel secure enough that we don't have to look outward. What was it about this innocuous poem that suggested to our technology that it was a threat?

Telling someone to do a good job and then go home is either wonderful, wise, if obvious, counsel or it is an extension of a kind of self-serving helplessness, a narcissistic defense. Tonight, I'm not sure which. Yes, I look around, locally and globally, and I don't know what to do. I go online and look at lists of what I can do, and they say nothing to me. Sending money, collecting t-shirts, offering prayers, wishing for regime change, begging for the disappearance of invisible, toxic clouds, all of that carries the same weightless futility. Tonight, I can only say to the world and its various peoples, I'm sorry for what is happening to you right now. I hope it gets better. That isn't much, I know.