Grief in Aurora: or Being Useless Over Here In My Little Corner of Headspace

Whenever something happens that is as stupid, as senseless, as horrifying, as crushing, as violent as someone walking calmly into a theatre in Aurora, CO and murdering as many other fellow human beings as he possibly can, it seems perfectly natural to me to cycle, both personally and as a collective sort of public conscious, through the various stages of grief. Right now I'm vacillating between anger and a melancholic sadness.

I’m even allowing myself to wonder occasionally at the differences between the public reaction and attention to something like this and the deaths of military members in the sandboxes overseas. Or the rate of suicide in the military, which comes at me by way of getting angry over some stupid Texan senator’s statements about the Moviehouse Slaughters. And, of course, anxiety over whether anyone that I have a connection to was there, was hurt, knows the murderer, knows the victims, etc., no matter that the chances of that are slim. The chances of anyone going to see a movie at midnight last night walking into the stuff of decades of nightmares was pretty slim, too. Slim chances mean next to nothing taken in context.

And then I return to that deep, energy draining sadness. I feel a hopelessness. But the odd thing (and I think that I may be about to make myself look like a shit, here) is that it is a very personal sort of hopelessness, rather than the empathetic grief for others’ anguish. It’s possible that I just feel useless? Once upon a time, I’d have gladly clutched onto the idea that I can pray for them, that praying would help these aching people through their grief. But prayer is a useless homeopathic salve for a railing conscience, a water pill against a raging cancer in my head. To a certain extent, I can only accept this discomfort for what it is, hold it and name it.

This learning how to simply let emotions lay down and take up space inside my head does not come easily. It’s far too easy for me to say, “I don’t like the way that I feel, I am going to change it. I don’t know how to change it other than with booze, so I’m going to do that.” Calm down, I’m not going to. But I know that I could. Instead, I am going to accept the discomfort for what it is. It is part of the grieving process that we all go through, and I am thankful that there are internet spaces like this one that can help me learn the tools to grieve for myself and for others without the salve of prayer or of an afterlife to make even the worst of things alright, because they are not alright, they are the opposite of alright. And it’s okay to acknowledge that and allow space for that, both in my own consciousness and the public consciousness.



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