Yesterday, Mourning

Grief and Hate in the Shitstorm of American Politics

There has rarely been such a sensational moment in politics as Trump's first week. Every step and misstep is noticed, every word, scorned or savored. Every idiotic symbol (Elon's not-a-Nazi salute) debated and analyzed by the brightest minds in the nation. As anyone could've predicted, his first day was a dumpster fire train wreck that no one could ignore.

No one, it seemed, but me.

As my long-time readers know, any other day, I would have been on the warpath. Crafting scathing remarks to sooth the real fear of what is to come. Yesterday, I was liberated from giving a fuck by the simple fact that it also happened to be my younger brother's 20th birthday. Which is to say, his 20th death day.

While everyone around the country was burning white hot with rage and indignation, publishing wrathful posts and derisive quips, I was cold and quiet. A frozen pond. Warm tears dripping through the cracks when I breathed too deeply or wrapped my thoughts too tightly around the razor edges of grief.

The pain was a gift; proof that my brother was real. Interestingly, it is also proof that all the charades of politics are less real. An unthinkable idea, but allow me to explain why this matters.

It reveals a soft truth of the human condition: that love is stronger than hate. For all the fireworks and foolishness, political showboating is theater. It is a desperate attempt to make strangers seem as important as our loved ones. Why?

Power thrives on attention. All publicity is good publicity. This is a truth of the entertainment industry that, idiot or not, Trump has proved himself to have a devious understanding of. It's an unfortunate reality that the people who hate Trump ultimately care just as much as those who love and support him. His entire career is built on a carefully cultivated collective obsession that relies quite as much upon hate as it does on love.

I want to remind you that all this shit is just shit. We have to shovel it. We don't have to roll around and grovel in it. We don't have to fling it at each other like monkeys in a zoo. We don't have to hold it under a microscope and whine about how bad it smells. It's shit. We are all clear on that.

To deny Trump the power of our collective rage, my tiny rebellion will be to tell you about my grief, which is really to tell you about my love, which, ultimately, is to tell you about your own:

Happy Belated Birthday, Ronan Diego Delgado. Heir to the family name. End of the long, unbroken line. Brother of mine…

The hype specific agony of infant death is having to live with unactualized potential. Squandered potential is easier to stomach. The nonexistent lives I might've lived if not for his death swirl around me like smoke. Impossible to catch and therefore impossible to deconstruct and depersonalize. The relationship I might've had with my father, if not for the loss of his prodigal son. The laughter I might've shared with my mother if not for the depression and brittleness his death caused her.

Parental grief is strange and inarticulate. It drove them apart, but not immediately. They separated like a command strip being pulled off the wall in gruesome, dry-rotted chunks. Their mourning cast a shadow across my small world that lingered long after the ambulance lights faded. It informed how much brighter my smile needed to be. How much more theatrical my fashion shows and perfect my grades. It was an eggshell to be stepped around entirely.

But what of my grief?

For years I didn't feel it at all. I only ever thought of my dead brother with a hollow sort of knowing. Like a room you don't go into or a song you skip out of habit. There are rules we create subconsciously, like guardrails, to keep us off the ledge of grief. It wasn't until his 18th birthday that I truly mourned him. It was sort of an accident, honestly.

That night, I lit a candle for his memory and decided, rather than go about my distractions as usual, to sit with it—with him.

I thought about a life in which he lived. A hundred holidays. Fights we might’ve had. Secrets and adventures we might’ve shared. I wondered what he would've looked like. I wondered if he would've been more like dad in humor or in anger. I wondered if he would've been kind and artistic like mom. Mostly, I wondered why he left me alone to grow up with half siblings and my parents’ bedraggled court of failed lovers.

A grief entirely my own finally washed over me, so great and heavy I sobbed for hours. Laying on my side, tears dripping sideways off my face. I watched the candle burn. I curled inward on myself, both hands over my broken heart as if I could reach into my chest and sooth it.

But I wouldn't relieve myself of the pain. It's an assurance that he was real. That I did have him, if only for a moment before he got put into some wretched oven and burned into dust. Dust that lives in a little satin blue box with my mother. My father couldn't keep his half of the ashes. He returned them to her without a word when I was eight.

Grief, in my experience, has always been paired with shame. Nothing a little self-imposed isolation can't fix.

There are few things as universal as grief. All things must exist in a balance and grief is the necessary counterweight to love. It anchors us to the earth. It binds us inextricably to one another. Yet, we are told to hide it. To stuff it into a dark corner of our mind and never bring it up at dinner parties.

The whole of yesterday, I wished I could be held. That someone could have played with my hair while someone else made me tea as I wept for nothing and everything. I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to my friends. Instead, I turned to my writing. I have tried to force this pain into a lesson that I can help others use in their own self-imposed isolations of grief.

If I could ask one thing of you, dear reader, it would be to tell more people about your grief. Share that pain, broken piece by broken piece, until you make something with it.

Allow your love to anchor you more than you allow your hate to guide you. Allow your grief to breathe and speak and be known. Only then can you protect yourself from becoming an attention mine for the least deserving people on planet earth.

My next piece will be a vitriolic, inflammatory piece on propaganda and how we can usurp its seemingly inescapable clutches.

For today, however, I am grieving.