This past week, from my college home several hours away, I heard the news of two police officers being murdered in cold blood in my home town. Des Moines is a small-town kind of city—yes, it’s technically a city, but it’s in a state full of small towns that are full of people who know each other and look out for each other. And we aren’t oblivious to the complex issues that have been fueling these violent outbursts all over the country. But there has always been an underlying assurance of safety, of familiarity with the place and the people.
And in one night that was shaken.
Reading the articles and watching the news, I knew exactly where those officers had been shot—I’d been there. Every Iowan I knew was grieving, was shaken.
And no matter how often I need to, I never know how to deal with grief. It’s an unwelcome visitor that plants itself on the living room couch and makes me suddenly obligated to live my normal life around it, with it, sometimes ignoring it.
And it’s even more bewildering when it’s a distant grief—then it becomes unbearable in a different way. It isn’t as if something or someone important in my life has been taken from me or hurt. As devastating as something like that is, there is, at least for a while, some understanding from others, some recognition that I can’t be expected to be myself.
But this grief is even more out of place—I never know how long I’ll have to deal with it, I never know how painful it’s going to be, and I never feel like it’s my own. I feel like I’m adopting someone else’s grief, or simply intruding on it myself. Instead of grief being the unwelcome visitor, it’s me, planting myself on the couch of someone who is closer to the pain and the devastation, who can’t be expected to be themselves.
I know this isn’t necessarily true. I know that empathy is something powerful that isn’t necessarily initiated by physical proximity. I know that it’s important. But sometimes grief is something that hits me from very far away, and it’s made even more intrusive by the helplessness and uselessness I feel. I like to do things, especially if I’m working through something emotionally. I need to keep busy and keep moving or I get overwhelmed and the uselessness is too much. And such was my situation, grieving two people I never knew from a place six hours away.
I don’t have any words of wisdom for working this out (and honestly, when it comes to grief, words of wisdom are often not immediately helpful). But I think it happens often—grieving over something that you can’t do anything about and never really belonged to you to begin with. So to anyone who has felt their own grief intrusive, or have grieved from very far away—I know, and you’re not alone.
