GRIEF

Written by: Rebekah Lamb

GRIEF comes in as many forms as love does. As writer Jaimie Anderson puts it: “grief is just love with no place to go.” 

I like to consider myself a bit of an expert on grief, both in the traditional and nontraditional ways in which the love in my life has stagnated, with no outlet. Losing my father to glioblastoma less than a year and a half ago has taught me the most traditional manifestation of the grief of losing a loved one; it has left me with a hole in my heart that has not healed, and that never will. But I’ve also learned all the ways grief becomes twisted into our daily experiences as disabled people, how it compounds upon itself and takes up a blighted root in the bottom of our stomachs. The grief of knowing that some things are just impossible to me, to have the graphic and painful everyday reality of my life and the lives of disabled people globally be dismissed and ignored by both the medical community and society as a whole. To watch the world grow increasingly apathetic to mass disabling violence, genocide, and rising eugenics. To witness those around us turn a blind eye to suffering throughout the world, to ignore the pain and suffering of this world and planet and those who live on it becomes far too much to bear. 

I grieve that I will never be ‘normal’ and that there is no fixing the reality that I belong to a demographic with a life expectancy below 40. I grieve the dreams I had that will never be realized because of my disability. I grieve the dreams of others that will never be realized because of the violence and destruction they are being subjected to. 

I grieve for those whose lives will be forever changed by carceral systems of healthcare, without delivering actual treatments and interventions. I grieve for those whose lives and homes are being lost to floods and fires being fueled by the World's wealthy. I grieve for my people who have seen so much devastation in 400 years that the trauma of it is written into our genetics. I grieve for the Earth herself who I hear through the wails of those suffering, that this is not right, that something must change.

And all this grief pushes me forward, fills me so much that I become electrified, because while I have learned if there is always grief in this world, that is because there is love, too. And I am filled with hope, hope that the damage that has been done can be undone and healed, that we can pursue true justice, and care for our most vulnerable as they need us. I believe all this, and I believe in the power of collective liberation and how it is rooted in love of the purest form. I know love can feed our liberation, and I know the world is full of love with no place to go, and I know there is love because I exist, and I am full of it.