“They died…” “Okay… and then what? That happened to them, where did YOUR story go next?”

At a certain age, I can’t say exactly which one, I was taught that asking “why?” or asking for an explanation, clarification, or context was typically more of an inconvenience than most individuals would prefer to deal with. So, I began to ask why less and less.

I don’t have an exact metric, nor can I measure how my own experiences might equate on a global scale, but, in my own experience, I’ve noticed that within 3 to 4 weeks (maximum) of losing a loved one or experiencing tragedy, the world gets noticeably quiet again.

When someone gets sick or dies, we tend to love bomb—we send letters, bake casseroles, like Instagram posts, and share platitudes and whatnot—but after we bury our dead, though feelings linger in varying degrees, those grieving know all too well that ovens cool, letters cease, conversations slow, and more or less we (or rather the world) move(s) on.

“Sex is not America’s greatest secret, death is.” – Alice Sebold

If you haven’t lost someone, for reference, I’ll use a larger scale example – I don’t remember when they stopped running articles for George Floyd, or when groups of us stopped amassing in protest of police brutality, I can’t remember how many weeks it took for the conversation about Ukraine to shift from screams to support to voices pleading to remove ourselves from the financial burden. And I don’t know how long protests for Palestine will last but I can only assume that they will stop somewhat shortly after the bombs do. They will not demand that homes be rebuilt, they will not wait to hold governments accountable. They will not have patience to outlast the decades it will take to rebuild what has been lost in months, and while I wish I had less confidence in saying that—well maybe part of me is just hoping someone will read this and prove me wrong…

In my experience, the longevity of one’s grief by experience or association vastly depends on the impact (or interruption) and proximity to that grief rather than on the topic of grief itself. By this I mean to suggest that those who know grief knows the companionship it lends and those who don’t assume it ends—it doesn’t.

I don’t know how many days or months or years it took for us, as a country, to decide to only talk about Martin Luther King Jr. during February or honor what brought about the Stonewall riots in June—but I know I’d all but forgotten about the wildfires in Hawaii until I saw the commercial during the Super Bowl. And shamefully like Hawaii I’d all but assumed the problems facing parts of Florida and Louisiana (Katrina) years after their devastating hurricanes were resolved until people who used to live there told me otherwise.

Which mostly goes to say, that if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t know. But a part of me looks at the scars I carry and thinks I should have. Part of me thinks that it shouldn’t take more disasters or crimes or loss of life to group things in such a way that they earn themselves a month of discussion, but often times that seems to be the case. That only after years of loss and pressure do we finally dedicate specific time to a cause that could be discussed far more often making it more preventable.

Humans have shown to be somewhat picky about what does and doesn’t hurt them—but what we show, in my experience, rarely reflects how we actually feel. The scars others see tell a fraction of the story that we live with, which means it’s up to us to share the rest, should we chose to do so.

And I think, as humans, we find bliss in that, in the plausible deniability and the not knowing…and while it’s not wrong to want to unburden ourselves of things we cannot control, how sad is it that some must sacrifice alone for others to thrive together.

Have you ever taken a minute to realize that maybe, just maybe, self-harm is more jarring than the mental health diagnoses that lead to it because we can only justify hurt when people are physically bleeding?

I suppose we could blame social media or news cycles. We could blame communities for growing beyond us in a way that we are less able to pay attention to the here and now of what’s in front of us. We could blame over correction and connection or information overload or curiosity but no matter what or who is to blame all of it merely seeks to avoid the issue.

At the end of the day, we all become ghosts. (Some of us even manage to do it before we die). All our stories become ghost stories. Tales passed on from generation to generation of lives well lived, of heroes and villains, and dreams pursued or deferred. And while most of our stories will be happy and impactful and triumphant, it’s also important to think about and remember the parts that weren’t. I guess this is all to say, in a world surrounded by ghost stories maybe there are still lessons to be learned by sharing them rather than letting them fade away. Maybe it’s worth looking at what keeps certain stories alive longer than others and what the impact to those ghosts and those who live on can be should we choose to keep their stories alive.

It’s up to us to remember the lessons others have led and it’s up to us not to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can only do that by sharing those stories and being honest with what future we are walking toward. So? how about it? What story will you share first?