Perhaps Comfort

My Facebook friend Jajai asked me this question yesterday: I am so distraught and sickened by the callous and downright cruel comments a lot of people are making about Alex Pretti’s murder. Do you have any words of comfort for me and the multitude of other decent people who feel the same? (The only thing I can come up with is thank God I’m not like them - even if that means being distraught and sickened on a daily basis.)

THIS GOES RIGHT TO THE HEART of what so many of us are experiencing right now, so I wanted to share a slightly edited version of my answer in case it’s helpful for even a moment or two. Writing it was. Helpful, that is.

Hi Jajai,

I have thought about your question and offer a few insights for consideration.

First: Yes, you and I and so many good people are appropriately distraught and distressed by the events of this dark era. We are supposed to be repelled by cruelty and inhumanity. So I want to remind us both to take comfort in our discomfort, for it means our hearts and souls are functioning properly. Painfully, yes. But properly.

Having spent time over the last few weeks spiraling in my own tortured questions about why the souls of so many fellow Americans seem not to be working properly, I now admit that the answers have not arrived and are not likely to.

I can set down the task, then, of figuring out this horrible puzzle. There might be someone who understands the abject cruelty of those who have wreaked havoc on lives in Minneapolis, and those who celebrate it, but that understanding is not yours or mine. The fixing of their souls will happen, or not, on someone else’s time.

There’s real comfort in that, too, but it requires sitting for a while before relief sets in.

I have spent many hours now focused on the discrete moments of the executions of two Americans at the hands of our government. I have watched and rewatched actual video of these crimes. I have played and replayed these scenes in closeup on the movie screen behind my eyes. I have been frozen in place, stuck with these good, normal human beings at the moments of their dying in storms of cruelty. I keep wanting the movies to turn out differently. They keep ending in tragedy.

Today as I stood in line at the post office, I succumbed to more obsessive reading in the New York Times app about nurse Alex Pretti’s death. I was scanning the transcript of a person describing Alex’s last moments as shown via various video vantage points. When the narrator reached the part where Alex’s assassin put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, I yelped.

Out loud. In the post office.

No one reacted.

I HAVE NOT BEEN ALL RIGHT, and that weird, embarrassing moment forced me to see it, albeit not for the first time. Sounds like you are not all right, either. I have been stuck in a freeze-frame with Renee Good and now with Alex Pretti, much as I was stuck for decades after my brother Greg died violently in a car accident back in the ‘80s. I could not stop thinking about that very worst moment of Greg’s life. I am embarrassed to say that this scene eclipsed any joy I had in remembering his life before that moment.

As it was after 9.11.85, when Greg died (when Greg was killed, as my father always put it), and again after the terror attacks of 9.11.01, I forget that the dead themselves do not get stuck in their own terrible last moments. They are alive one second and then suddenly not, at which point they shrug off the chains of this world and, I feel sure, are lifted into the glories of the next. Perhaps not to heaven as we are taught by religious tradition, but perhaps something better.

And if the dead could still be here, I am sure they would place their hands on our shoulders and tell us to waste no more time thinking about the cruel ones. They’d remind us to take just a few steps forward to do the next right thing. To do our jobs. Feed the squirrels. Run our households and care for our loved ones. Be righteous citizens.

They would remind us, I think, that we have a responsibility to run better movies in our heads — the ones where everyday people commit ordinary and miraculous acts of love and creativity in this, yes, glorious world.

I’m a big fan of Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax. The other day, Hax’s column concerned a woman who was suddenly dumped by her partner and kicked out of their home. The cruelties mounted. She learned that when she’d been on a trip, her partner had let his side piece use her toiletries and drive her car.

The letter writer wasn’t asking Hax how to get over the loss of her love. She wanted to know how to feel safe again in her own skin after experiencing such a terrible shock.
Part of Hax’s fulsome response made such an impact on me that I took a screenshot to keep it handy on my phone.

“There are basically two responses to a shocking experience like yours, where it stops being theoretical that life can come for you at any time, no matter what, and becomes all too real,” Hax wrote. “The first is to be on constant watch for life to strike again. Ever on alert, never trusting.”

This was me for the first 30 years after Greg died. This was me for the first 20 years after terrorists flew planes into buildings on 9/11.

“The second,” Hax continued, “is to say to yourself: ‘It seemed unbearable at times, especially thinking I could be so wrong. But I cried, worked hard, used the support I still had and got through it. And I feel strong for knowing I have that in me.’”

“Maybe that’s the only ‘safe’ there is: internal,” Hax said. “Confidence in a strength that can be summoned if we need it again.”

Confidence in our own strength to endure. Boy, could I have used that that perspective years ago. It never occurred to me that feeling grief and pain wasn’t the same as being helpless. All those years, I never thought to notice that I managed to keep going, which is a form of strength, and that if the bottom fell out again some day, I could rely on that same strength.

Here we are, then, living in the shock and bearing life in all its unbearability. We fixate on the reality of government executing American citizens in the streets. We allow ourselves to be obsessively drawn toward proof of the oozing cruelty with which far too many of our neighbors have responded.

But. We bear the horror by remembering that, no matter what, love always lives alongside fear and hatred here on Planet Earth. We get through it by recalling that we each have a well of inner strength to drink from when we are thirsty.

And we take comfort in holding two truths at once: We have to bear witness to our times and we also have to step forward into each new day, doing the next right, life-affirming, truth-seeking, loving thing.

Hope this helps. God bless.