“Go that way, they said, it’s easy, like learning to climb stairs after the amputation,” writes Linda Pastan in her poem “The Five Stages of Grief.”
Is there any better way to speak of the misguided, misattuned advice Los Angeles residents are getting from both the well-intentioned and the malicious? Whether it’s celebrity-haters dripping with schadenfreude telling Mandy Moore to take her GoFundMe page and shove it to the bleeding hearts bursting with the unasked-for advice to be grateful that your house is still standing. Or that you survived.
But let’s be straight here, Los Angeles: You’ve just experienced thousands upon thousands of psychic deaths, not to mention the to-be-numbered literal deaths awaiting identification.
Living almost 3000 miles away in New York, I felt the blasts in an Instagram post by Palisades resident and writer Zibby Owens. Although her house miraculously survived, Owens was in a post-traumatic loop recalling the Eden that was her town, her inner critic buzzing like a black-fire beetle, asking her: “What right do YOU have to be so sad?”
Owens was feeling all the classic stages of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s early harbingers of grief. Shocked, despondent, and hopeless, her soul was as crushed as the skeletons of homes scattered around her. But with a healthy middle-finger to all the glib haters of her privilege and her nasty internal critic, she shot back: “Yet, we’re the ridiculously lucky ones.”
I immediately responded even though I don’t know her personally. I told her that she’s entitled to feel all of this and more. The half-life of grief is so much longer than people give it credit for, and there are so many more layers of it than our culture cares to look at—uUntil that is, we’re forced to.
You might think Owens was right on schedule with the anger that follows denial like a penguin about to careen off the side of a melting iceberg. Unfortunately, grief isn’t as linear a process as those five stages imprinted on us.
Pastan likens it to a circular staircase: You’re bargaining at the same time that you’re telling the world to go to hell all the while still incredulous that anything really happened. You feel survivor guilt and gratitude and anger at God and the politicians who should have prevented this.
That’s right: Anything that makes you feel in control and seen and heard in this firestorm of emotion is what you need. Those feelings are travelling as fast as those Santa Ana winds, and you’ve got to let them take you where you need to go. It’s what you need right now: good grief.
Good grief is like civil-rights icon John Lewis’s concept of good trouble: It’s loving and rebellious but it’s got its own course for setting the world right again. It’s digging into the loss of the past and the future, the physical and the metaphysical, the personal and the collective.
Allow yourself to feel it all.
There’s no timetable or statute of limitations on your grief, Los Angeles. Not only are we rooting for you here in the audience, praying that our beloved city of angels sees the golden light of the sun and awakens to its former dream again. You deserve good grief until acceptance enters like that dashing character in a film you never hoped you’d live to see.