Mourning In America
On Catharsis
America, hope is making a comeback.
Yeah.
Michelle Obama, August 20, 2024
Because I am slow and August was hard, for reasons I will spare you, the Democratic National Convention has come and gone with its attendant ink spillage near complete. Lucky for you, Unique Subscriber, one of the things I found most notable about LalapaKamala seems to have been largely ignored. It’s the subject Michelle Obama framed her entire speech around, and on the penultimate night Vice President Harris accepted her party’s nomination to the highest office in the land, she did it too, albeit less explicitly.
Before the exultation. Before the jubilation. Before the veritable ecstasy. The thing we carried around and didn’t discuss except where it leaked out of us in snarky asides and brittle cyber quips. Michelle finally gave some language to it:
…to be honest, I am realizing that, until recently, I have mourned the dimming of that hope. And maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, that deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future. And for me, that mourning has also been mixed with my own personal grief.
History will remember what the former First Lady delivered to a bursting Chicago arena as the most remarkable speech of her electrifying oratorical career. Arguably, it was one of, if not the most searing convention speeches ever given by anyone, and certainly within my lifetime. The Ginsu-sharp fillet she made of 45’s entire personality and Wizard of Oz-conceived political operation. Veil-piercing lines about the vast majority of Americans not enjoying “the luxury of failing forward” nor benefiting from “the affirmative action of generational wealth” were immediately engraved into our national consciousness.
Barack and Michelle, along with their daughters, suffered more than a decade of vile bigotry and abuse as a direct result of Donald Trump’s pathological fixation on them, after which Mrs. Obama placed an arm gently behind her successor’s Tiffany blue- back and gently guided her into the White House. So it was deeply satisfying when she stood before a rapturous hometown audience eight years later, finally laying waste to the entire con and diagnosing the source of its malignancy. A personal abreaction we enjoyed simply by bearing witness to it. In a word:
Catharsis.
Look. I know I talked a good game about how we would win with Biden at the top of the ticket, but the truth is, after that slow-motion car crash of a debate back in June, I found myself increasingly paralyzed by visions of just how cold it would be in November, how dark it would be in December, and how if Captain Clownfucks were to be sworn in as President again in January, my brain straight up wouldn’t be able to take it. Because when I tell you I have reached Zoloft’s ceiling, that isn’t a rhetorical flourish. It is simply the case that I am not legally permitted to inhibit the reuptake of my serotonin any further than the FDA currently allows.
All of which is to say: Thank God. And by God, I, of course, mean His/Her/Their brigade of angels in the form of a variety of human beings, including but probably not exclusive to Ezra Klein, George Clooney, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the one and only Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi. I think it’s safe to assume at this point that their public and backroom machinations led directly to the 323-word letter (yes, I counted) President Biden published without any traditional media interference, right on Al Gore’s very own internet. And that statement he issued on July 21st, plus the one immediately following it endorsing Harris, has provided this little American project of ours a real opportunity to avoid History’s storied and overfull dustbin.
Instead of bracing for defeat, we can now look forward to an Adam McKay Oscar-nominated movie and slate of prestige television events about the 28 days preceding the moment when whoever on Joseph R. Biden’s Digital Seal Team 6 ultimately hit send because that shit was fucking awesome.
Over those four days and nights in Chicago, the Right’s chokehold on national pride was expeditiously unclenched. Democrats frozen in fear everywhere had concepts held hostage by the likes of Frank Luntz suddenly returned to them. Freedom and Security and Patriotism became ideological jumpballs once again. This feat wasn’t accomplished in a vacuum. It resulted from a staggeringly impressive convention, which included the purposeful, intimate portraits both Michelle Obama and Vice President Harris painted of their indomitable mothers—specifically through the crucible of losing them.
Through grief.
Folks, I still feel her loss so profoundly. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to be here because of the sense of duty that I feel to honor her memory. And to remind us all not to squander the sacrifices our elders made to give us a better future.
—Michelle Obama 8/20/2024
Marian Robinson had only been gone three months before her daughter took the United Center’s main stage. If you’ve ever lost anyone you deeply loved, but particularly if you’ve lost a parent, you know viscerally the unsteadiness to which Michelle referred. And you marvel at her ability to deliver a soaring disquisition of hope in the wake of it.
Grief is physical, of course, but it’s fundamentally psychic. Your axis splits. You are at once unmoored. Vertigo of the soul.
Remember that surreal night in November 2016? When cortisol ran through a firehose as the map turned too red to refuse? And all the doom-drenched days after, during which we silently grieved. The person in charge of us was insatiable. His hunger for public attention, a proxy for unconditional love, persistently denied him as a child. An entire country and much of the world existed from moment to moment at the mercy of an emotionally arrested toddler cosplaying adult power, replete with a way-too-long-for-him tie, compulsively acting out his developmental trauma on both the domestic and world stage, trailing toilet paper as he went. The type of tantrums typically reserved for frantic mothers on airplanes or mouthing ashamed apologies in Walmart aisles. An entire Presidency conducted through hysterical fits. If you’re wondering what this has to do with Michelle’s speech, well, it’s this:
Taken to one extreme, Donald Trump is what it looks like when you’ve lost something unidentified but profound, and no one ever speaks of it. When no one ever tells you while it’s happening, it’s okay to be mad or sad about it. When no one ever holds you or meets your gaze afterward and says, It’s going to be okay. I’m here. I love you. You’re safe.
Donald Trump is what it looks like when a very young child is fed a diet of rage, narcissism, and neglect instead of love, mirroring, and tenderness. The worst possible outcome of what an unexamined psyche buries to survive.
A soul in exile.
We are a culture that only lets people grieve in prescribed ways for obvious losses and only over a certain amount of time. There are no rituals or public conversations around mourning what we most wanted or needed, but for whatever reasons we couldn’t have. There are no rituals for grieving the belief, however privileged it may have been, that we could trust the bedrock morality of our fellow citizens, our elected leaders, or the structures upon which many of us depended for too long.
—
March of 2020. A biological bomb erupts halfway around the world. The entire planet is engulfed in an ever-expanding mushroom cloud of what Michelle finally named for us last month.
Remember. That after the terroristic viral reign, after it ransacked the globe and left ghost cities in its place, when the fear of severe sickness and companionless death, compounded by the required isolation to survive it, finally spit us out into the long light of mid-June, we watched a slow and vicious murder conducted through the authority of the state. We watched it occur in broad daylight on one of the many millions of our country’s streets. We watched it hunched over our phones and staring slack-jawed at our screens. Dehumanization. On a loop. Digitized. Horror.
We listened again and again to a little girl’s father saying he could not breathe, and we heard him issue the most universal, recognizable prayer there is
Mama.
The sudden drop in humidity, the way the blue of the sky turns deeper against the softening light of an earlier dusk. It used to mean the anxious thrill of returning to mental organization by default. Up with the sun. Focus demanded. Intense Structure. Forced socialization. Required results.
9/11 is tomorrow. My father died fourteen years and two yesterdays ago.
September means something else now.
Once, I was told that your bones and cells regenerate every seven years. And I wondered if that’s why people in love get sick of each other around then.
I don't feel like a person with a new set of bones, much less two. I don't know where old cells go when they give up dividing. Everything is a particle and a wave, and energy is eternal. Matter shifting states. Ice melts into water. Water evaporates into mist. Rain falls out of the sky. Most of the time, I know this. I can feel the truth of it. It’s how I’d explain it to a child.
Still.
—
During those four days and nights in Chicago, I often wept. I wept with hope and with relief. Relief from the dread. Relief from the grief. Mine and yours. I’m almost certain you know what I mean.
Because in that thrumming arena, it was so obvious, it was clear as a lucid dream.
The ones we’ve been waiting for. There we were. Here all this time
—
I write letters to people in swing states. You’re supposed to tell them, in a non-partisan way, why you vote. I tell them how my father was a Marine in World War II. That he fought against fascism with his young body, with his whole self. I tell them he turned 19 on the island of Iwo Jima and that his best friend Thornton Lyttle, who went by Gus, died fighting fascism right next to him.
I tell them that my Dad and I voted together in every election when he was alive. I tell them now that he’s gone, I vote in his honor and memory, wearing something of his to the polls. But of course, those button-down shirts with their frayed collars and the soft, brightly colored sweaters (fuschia, orange, lime green) I’d never choose for myself aren’t how I carry him.
I mean, I don’t really tell the swing voters all of that. There’s not enough room. And even if there were, I know it’s a bit…much.
I tell them some of it, though, the gist, whatever I can fit. And I pray every time I seal an envelope that I am a secret alchemist. That the words I write down mean we still exist. Together, out there, somewhere. That part of him may find a way through me into a person he never knew and who I’ll never meet.
A stranger. Who shares this country’s brutal legacy and its glistening unmet promises.
Someone like me, maybe. Who feels things a little too…much. Who mourns the dead, feels the dread, and tries to keep finding hope in it.
Someone who decides to place a bet on fighting tooth and nail for it.
America, the path that led me here in recent weeks was, no doubt, unexpected. But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys. So, my mother, our mother, Shyamala Harris, had one of her own. And I miss her every day, and especially right now.
And I know she’s looking down smiling.
I know that.
—Kamala D. Harris 8/23/2024
Thank you for this, dearest Guinz. You astonish me, every time. This one really struck deep.
You have such a gift, Amanda dearest, for making us deeply feel what you deeply feel, and what Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris deeply felt at our convention that I sit here with wet eyes, missing my mother too! May all the stirrings of grief giving way to hope at the bottom of our hearts, bring wisdom and compassion back to Main St, USA. 🌱🌱