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How I’m Surviving the Second Trump Term
In her book The Gravity of Joy, Angela Williams Gorrell describes the experience of grief with an almost alarming clarity. Gorrell was hired to research joy and teach a class called, “What Makes Life Worth Living” at Yale. But she lost three family members in the span of four weeks shortly after taking up her post as a joy researcher.
“Joy?” she writes. “Life was just a long march toward death.”
I find her stark description of grief, particularly the way the world kept moving, poignant. Poignant because it was like she was describing my own experiences with grief; poignant because I realized, many years later, that the experience of grief was so universal; and poignant because it’s how I’m feeling right now.
She writes that the world kept moving, days kept coming and going, and she just wanted to scream at everyone. She was so angry. “I woke up angry; I went to bed angry.” Couldn’t the rest of the world see that everything was irrevocably changed, that the world as they had known it would never be the same?
Gorrell was having both a unique and universal experience of grief. It’s one I’ve had. The year after my grandfather died was characterized by days spent fighting the battle with anger. Anger that the world was moving on and I wasn’t ready to move on with it.
