It’s been more than 50 years since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the five stages of grief.  I have been wondering how to apply those stages to what is happening in America under Donald Trump, because make no mistake about it, America under this administration is grieving. And I have come to the conclusion that it’s impossible.  The normal processes do not apply.

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America is grieving.

We are grieving those we have lost to extreme weather events, fires, and other climate-related disasters.  We are grieving those we continue to lose to gun violence.  We are grieving those we are losing to preventable diseases because they weren’t vaccinated.  We are grieving the loss of those who have been snatched off the streets and sent to foreign prisons and domestic concentration camps.  We are grieving the banning of books, the suppression of dissenting voices, the attacks on the arts.  We are grieving the loss of rights we thought we had protected forever.  We are grieving the wanton destruction of our democracy by those who should be responsible for its preservation. We are grieving the loss of some certainty, some control, some confidence that our lives will provide us with at least the minimum we need for not just happiness, but survival.

We are grieving so many things.  Too many to list.

And the list keeps growing.  The grief keeps compounding day-by-day, hour-by-hour.

The grief is simply too profound, too overwhelming, and too unrelenting.

How do we grieve, how do we process our grief, how do we heal?  Grief takes time.  Grief takes effort.  We cannot simply move on, and we cannot deal with either our grief or the causes.

And it seems that this overwhelming onslaught of grief is deliberate.  It’s intentional.

A political class that rose to power by feeding the grief, and the grievances of millions, have now institutionalized, legislated, and militarized grief as their primary strategy to keep the power other people’s grief has given them.

And the mourning will continue, and the traumas compound.  We hear the threats to take over cities, to turn the military loose on US citizens, to defund universities, to slam on the brakes on alternative fuels, to destroy decades of progress on human rights, minority rights, on access to vital resources for people other than white, nominally-Christian men, to flout both law and morality at home and abroad.  And the threats are made manifest by men with hidden faces and flaunted weaponry, by politicians who steal from the most vulnerable to give to the most powerful, by politicians and bureaucrats who lead by lies and conspiracies.

Suddenly, those three brass monkeys with their hands on their eyes, ears and mouths seem as though they have the right idea.  Shut it all out.  Stop the noise, stop the pictures, don’t say anything that might cause argument or worse.  But we can’t shut it all out.  Even those monkeys can only do one thing at a time.  Cover your eyes, and you can still hear the cacophony.  Cover your ears, and you can still see the chaos.  Cover your mouth, and you are left with no way to say what everything you can see and hear is eating you up with grief.

And so, our grief is manifested in fear and anger.  We hide away or we strike out.  We cling too tightly to the people and things we love, or we push them away because our grief makes love too painful.  We shout rather than talk.  How can we empathize with others’ pain when we are paralyzed by our own? 

This is the real, comprehensive, most dangerous consequence of Donald Trump and those who surround him, prop him up, hide behind him as they destroy our democracy to build a white nationalist fascist state around a theocratic rhetoric they don’t even really believe or practice.

We need to accept that the process of grief – that long, delicate, exhausting path toward acceptance and healing – is, for now, a luxury we can’t afford.  We cannot allow our grief to keep us from acting. 

The window of opportunity for turning things around is both too short and too long.

There is speculation that Donald Trump may be about to succumb to failing health or failing politics, or he may be around for a long while yet.  But the damage is already done.  When he is gone, the grief will remain, and we cannot let it keep us from doing the necessary work.  Recovery will be long and difficult, and we cannot wait until the next election or the one after that, the next administration, the next generation of leaders. 

The work has to start now.  It has to start with all of us, individually and in our families and in our communities.  The public work, the protests and the resistance are important, but we also have to make it close and make it personal.  We must not let our mourning isolate and weaken us.  We need each other, our collective and shared empathy and support, our common will and our common strength.  Talk together, grieve together, cry together, shout together. 

There is every reason to hope that the country will survive this and have a chance to rise anew from whatever is left of us.  Until then, let us try to turn our grief into positive action, into empathy, into helping each other.