A Loss in Process: Debate, Death, and Denial
America feels like a stranger. How can we begin to confront the grief of failed expectations?
This week, I’m offering a little different piece of writing: A small meditation on my family and America. As much as punditry could help you understand the politics of the moment, I think we need to understand something about grief to understand where we are in history.
Stranger in my own land
“Excuse me, who are you?”
C. pulled up behind me at the stables in her white Jeep, a cigarette precariously glued to her lip.
I responded, “I’m Jim and Dianne’s daughter.”
“Ah. Well you know, your uncle Ted just doesn’t like strangers roaming around.”
I winced. Me? A stranger?
She asked about my Aunt Becky, Ted’s wife — my neighbors on the farm in Western Pennsylvania.
“Did they put her in hospice yet?”
“Yes.” I was on my way there later.
I followed C. into the barn that defined so much of my youth.
“Be careful,” said C., “I’m going to let these horses out but I never know how they react to strangers.”
Strangers? If she only knew that I had probably picked up half the DNA of these horses’ grandparents at the airport in refrigerated sperm boxes for my uncle to later inseminate. If she only knew that I had spent many a morning helping Becky: the original caretaker before she got too sick. To think these horses couldn’t smell the Tomson on me hurt deeply. Suddenly I felt like a dead-beat dad who expects their kids to love them even though they hadn’t been there for their kids’ entire lives. Don’t you remember me? You look like me. I smell like you. I’ve breathed into your nostrils so you’d never forget.
Or was that your mother?
Loss in process // Lost in process
At this moment in America, I can’t help but feel a loss in process. The farm and the country feel like they are slipping away.
I’ve lost my dear aunt, someone who was the center of our family farm and scrap metal business. Someone who loved me fiercely and unconditionally. Someone who managed to elevate a family from imagining to living the American Dream: Rolling hills fenced with horses. Paid off homes. Crown vetch with the family acronym in the landscaping “TSM:” Turn Scrap to Money or Tomson Scrap Metal. Brothers and nieces living down the road. Destinies linked by loyalty, grit, love, and fear of going back. What will it mean to be on the farm without Becky? Without that pure love emanating from her buttery stove top and craft bins?
Simultaneously — as is my heritage coming from politically engaged junkmen — I feel this loss against the inevitable generational change we all face as Millennials, becoming next in line to be the adults in the room. Will we be able to go from imagining to living our dreams?
The night Becky was buried, I tuned in to monitor debate chatter and watch two geriatrics duke it out for who will be the most powerful man in the world. Both are older than my lovely, now deceased, aunt.
As is normal on Failure to Communicate, I could write a pithy analysis of why that debate was the logical end of a style of politics that had — for many years — put “vibes” ahead of policy or spoken ideology. The debate was a jumbled mess of floating signs and signifiers for political junkies looking for a shout out to whatever cause they cling to. The 90 minute cable program was a chaotic display of competing legacies — not visions for the future.
What the debate laid bare was something existential and deeply jarring: the inevitable end of whatever this cycle of history and political leadership we’ve been experiencing in a post-Cold War world. Dare I say a Fourth Turning? I jest.
The explanations for American greatness are taken for granted by President Biden. The folk understanding of capitalism does not describe our economic realities. The entertainment of former President Trump’s populist punching no longer feels like the Good News of an outsider savior, nor a funny show. We may feel like strangers on our own farm because we don’t know how to narrate our role in the national story, in part because more powerful voices won’t set down the mic.
Americans have long imagined America to have a sense of direction and the ability to competently execute on that in the world. Perhaps because of our increasingly high expectations misaligning with our experience of American life, it all feels confusing. Vibrancy and life feels missing from the politics of bean-counting and possibility feels missing from the militant moralism of those who say they know what’s right. There is something deadening to this gulf.
What we are experiencing, in a word, is grief.
Grieving Old Expectations to Imagine Better Ones
When our expectations of reality don’t match our experiences or ambitions for it, life can begin to feel unreal. This is something I call the Authenticity Gap (for a future post). In this gap, a considerable amount of grief can emerge.
Grief of what was. What could’ve been. What could be but feels too hopeless. Of work put in with no reward as of yet. Of knowing a time when expectations and experience aligned… and mourning that those times are gone. This is also where we can be manipulated, deluded into thinking that we were owed something to begin with by sweet talkers and con men.
The bucolic working farm of my childhood — the American Dream made incarnate by my family — may not always be there. Perfectly recreating it would be impossible and honestly ill-advised. New Dreams have to be made to fit the times and the people who live in them.
I am a student of history. Missed expectations have been a catalyst for the ever re-inventing wheel of the American Dream and the American story. A push for something new usually comes with grieving a conception of what was. That is how we go from dreaming to living.
Those who keep on keeping on to reinvent, pursue, and persist in manifesting our country’s founding vision of liberty and justice for all, despite the injustice of it all, get to define the next generation of America. Grieving is a part of the work of moving on, making space for what’s next.
Those who know the Dream is a north star not a promise — something created not owed – tend to “get” it. It is both a collective ambition and an individual contribution.
Ours is the project of groups of people who get up everyday to take care of each other and the horses. It is also a project of those who are willing to imagine the next generation of what that care looks like when the moment comes to acknowledge that yes, time has passed.