Why It's Ok To Let Yourself Cry For The Children Who Died In The Flood

Gratitude, love and renewed resolve are waiting on the other side of grief

Hello friends.

My two children are away at summer camp right now. This morning I pulled up the page where the camp posts photos, and clicked through frame after frame, until I saw my 8-year-old daughter. She was gathering black-eyed Susans in the garden. A dreamy smile on her face. Her front teeth still slightly large for her face, and her hair cut in a pageboy.

Then I moved over to another tab to look at pictures of the other little girls at summer camp. The ones who died in the flood. Lila, Eloise, Janie, Hadley, Hannah, Rebecca, Linnie, Mary.

It’s Mary, 8 years old like my daughter, who makes me crumple in tears.

Her face is flushed, her hair is stringy with sweat. She’s wearing a little blue backpack fastened in front with a chest strap, and she’s outside somewhere, with trees, brush, a scattering of rocks on the ground. She is absolutely beaming, incandescent with joy.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have allowed myself to cry those tears. To touch that grief. Because I didn’t think it belonged to me. I might have thought it was parasitic, or pathetic, or pointlessly painful to wallow in another family’s tragedy.

Now I feel differently.

I believe the loss of children all over the world, to climate disasters, epidemics, famine, war, children we’ll never know and whose faces we’ll never see, belongs to each of us. And I believe that those tears serve a purpose.

As part of my book research I spoke recently with Miriam Greenspan, a psychotherapist, poet and “modern day alchemist" who “teaches us to turn pain into wisdom and fear and sorrow into energy to improve the world.” Her book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions: the Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, is a profound, spiritual, challenging text.

Her wisdom is hard won. Her mother was the sole survivor of her family from the Holocaust; her father lost many family members as well. Her first experience of alchemizing grief was losing a baby boy, her first child. She has written a book of poetry about the loss of her daughter to addiction during the pandemic, just four years ago.

While her experience of personal and generational loss is deep, Greenspan believes, as I do, that as a culture, we also need to be spending much more time honoring our collective emotions at what is happening to the world.

“I fully believe you cannot live in an ecocidal context without on some level knowing you’re destroying yourselves and our planet,” she told me.

“We are living in an era of toxified dark emotions and a highly toxic emotional ecology that is only getting worse.

Why? Because clearly the world is getting worse!

Multiple threats including ongoing ecocide, the rise of social media that has radically shortened everyone’s attention spans, the political culture of misinformation, disinformation, the decline of the very idea of truth, the rise of fascism in the US, etc, have given rise to heightened anxiety, depression, hostility, powerlessness, meaninglessness, and anomie.”

The very list is overwhelming.

Yet, Greenspan has an almost mystical faith in the power of “detoxifying” by letting these feelings out, particularly in community, with trusted others who can provide support.

For one thing, it's a relief.

“The relief of being able to openly speak about one's grief, fear, despair in a context where you're not pathologized. Where you're not immediately seen as mentally ill.”

I felt that relief this week when I held space briefly on a call with fellow parent climate organizers, to share our feelings about the loss of life from this disaster.

(Beyond the paywall: the adapted guided meditation for grief and the song that I shared)

Then, with the open expression of feelings we often fear and repress, Greenspan says, comes an alchemy, a transformation.

This is true biochemically, in the body. Tears activate the parasympathetic nervous system, calming us, slowing our breath. They release oxytocin, helping us bond with trusted others who may respond to the social signal of our tears to connect, soothe and reassure. Tears release endorphins, lifting our spirits. They may help the body shed stress hormones.

When grief is allowed to flow unimpeded, Greenspan writes, she finds “an imperceptible movement occurs, from sorrow for what has been lost to gratitude for what remains.”

It’s often said that grief is another face of love. The summer I myself was a camp counselor, at the age of 18, I felt a kind of love for my campers that surprised me. It turned out to be a faint premonition of the love I later experienced as a mother.

I remember staying up late with fellow counselors to trade minutia about our kids’ days, their challenges and their triumphs. It was especially sweet to see how the boys, my friends, grew into their caregiving roles and fretted over their charges.

Teenagers ourselves, we loved these children because we cared for them. Because their safety was in our hands, because they trusted us and needed us. One of my eight year old campers called me Mommy.

So what if, right now, if we move toward, and through, the grief together? If we let ourselves feel, behind the grief, that kind of collective, universal love and gratitude for all children? For the generation with whose welfare we have been entrusted? Whether we’re parents or not?

If we did then the message would be clear. No more children in harm’s way. No more war, no more famine, no more communities without protection and support as climate change gets worse.

According to Climate Central: the conditions that fed this deadly flood include :

A supercharged water cycle.

A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture & releases it unevenly.
This creates more intense rainfall across much of Texas.

Rain rate increases tied to climate change account for >30% of U.S. inland flood damage since 1988.

Low-level moisture fueling this system came from a warmer-than-average Gulf of Mexico.
Sea surface temps are 1°–2°F above average for early July—made 10x to 30x more likely by climate change.

As it turns out, there is a parable about what needs doing now, and it involves pulling drowning children out of a river.

In the parable, these rescues are a metaphor for direct service work—urgent, clear, lifesaving, emotionally appealing.

The crucial next step, though, is asking why the children are falling in the river in the first place. That is the question that leads to social action and structural change. This is where our grief can ultimately lead us.

Kerr County Flood Relief Fund is taking donations.

Good news

Want to read some good news about Jewish people, and trans people, and Jewish trans people, and solidarity? Here you go!

(Beyond the paywall: my adapted guided meditation for grief that I shared on a call with parent climate activists this week)

adapted from Mindful.org

1. To begin, take a comfortable seat and rest. Slowly, breathe deeply, in and out. Relax and settle, coming into a present-moment experience. What is really happening to you here and now?

2. Now bring to mind the losses we’ve been witnessing. One hundred and twenty lives lost and counting in the floods in the Texas Hill country. 173 people still missing with little hope that they are still alive. Dozens of children, babies to teenagers. The cabin full of eight- and nine- year old little girls at Camp Mystic. You may have seen some of their faces in the last few days.

3. Start with your body and your immediate somatic experience. What bodily sensations do you notice? Do you feel grounded? Restless? hollow, heavy?

4. Now rest in your throat center. So often the throat is connected with grief. And it wells up in tightness and has a kind of ache that can arise when we’re about to cry, when we’re shocked or have a sense of loss. Notice where else your grief is being held in your body—it could be your heart, your throat, your stomach. They all hold something, they are processing something— without words, without direction, naturally, the body knows.

5. Bring yourself to your heart, in the middle of your chest, and simply feel the heart holding the grief, being filled by that grief. Put your hands over your heart. Your raw, tender, loving, vulnerable, beating heart. And rest with that.

6. Then direct your attention to what emotions are arriving. Sorrow, anger love, tenderness, frustration, resentment, bewilderment, disappointment, there could be a sense of intensity or a sense of dullness.

Don’t judge what you’re feeling. Just feel. Let your emotions manifest. Welcome them. Don’t suppress them and also don’t feed them.

Emotions are the energy of our grieving. And they change. They’re always changing, like life itself. Be gentle. If you start to feel overwhelmed, take a break, rest, breathe. Resettle. Allow yourself time to rest in your present-moment bodily emotional experience.

When we touch the collective grief, we also touch the fierceness of our collective, protective love. We are here to keep each other safe.

We liberate our love, liberate our joy and gratitude in a very powerful way, when we expand our hearts to hold grief.

Take a few more deep breaths…and let them out..let yourself come back into the present moment.

Open your eyes.

Share back anyone who wants to verbalize how they’re feeling ..