Transcript Excerpt

Jeff: You know, my partner’s family was affected, and that’s pretty much all I want to say specifically because they’re private people and I want to respect that. I will say that there was just the fog of war where there’s so much happening, it’s hard to take in hour by hour, there’s circumstantial evidence accumulating. But what was — I hate to say “beautiful” — but the family immediately came together in one home, literally three generations, and they have been there essentially ever since. And there is a vigil that is going on that is deeply human.

And if you think of every culture, people want to be in a we-space in their grief, as at the same time they’re acknowledging that the center of their we-space, the person who was the center of everything, is gone suddenly and violently and all of that. From what I can see, there’s just a wonderful humanness — we can talk about how we relate to it and how we can feel into it and so forth — these people have no choice. And what is beautiful about it is that they’re allowing it, they’re witnessing it with each other, they’re coming, they’re going, the waves swell and crest and recede and come back. And I can’t imagine anything healthier than that in response to this.

Nomali and I were talking this morning, we did a little mini-segment on this and grief and so forth. And we talked about Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s [stages of grief], denial and bargaining and depression and acceptance and all of that. Acceptance isn’t enough, there has to be something that’s more alive than ever, there’s something that’s more enchanted than ever. There’s some ripping of the veil between this world and the other world that people step into and create meaning.

Nomali: [That’s] the sixth stage that her academic partner David Kessler introduced, which is after “acceptance”, called “finding meaning.”

Corey: One of the things that strikes me as I hear you talk is just how sort of typical this is for the human condition. When we’re standing in the wake of some of the worst acts of humanity, that’s often when we see the clearest examples of the best of humanity. Oftentimes it seems to require the evil to draw out the goodness, which I think is an unfortunate reality of our time, that the only time we really I think have an opportunity to take inventory, to take stock, to count our blessings and our gratitudes, and to feel any amount of abundance in our life is when something gets violently taken away from us or from someone we know, or from our community. Not that we want to, you know, bypass all the more uncomfortable emotions in order to get to that acceptance and that meaning-making, which is maybe something we can talk about here.

Nomali: Speaking of the actual on-the-ground Boulder experience, if you are in the Boulder Denver area, I highly encourage you also if possible, to go to the site. I went there this morning and it’s amazing to just be there and to see and to feel the pain, but also the support and the outpouring of love. That broken heart is an open heart. There was such a pure experiencing of that for me this morning, the witnessing and embodying and holding space for immense grief, as well as seeing the support and the love. So do it, if you can. It’s a little bit of a pilgrimage of sorts.

Mark: [One aspect] of spiritual awareness is that nothing is ever the same, so it is an opportunity to really, truly be one with spirit and its always-changing nature. And these moments are so powerful because they are deep reminders and invitations to truly waking up. And it sounds Jeff like your partner’s family, I’m struck by their awareness, their love, their ability to gather. And then I wonder about the other families that are in ta similar position, and how we’re able to talk about stages of grief and loss — but some of these other folks, do they have those spiritual tools at their disposal and familial support?

Corey: I think that your encouragement to make this pilgrimage is actually so important, because part of what we’re doing is we’re reclaiming those fears. We’re not allowing this to sort of slip into some sort of aversion. Because you’re right, every time you go through that neighborhood, something is going to feel different, because something IS different. But we can sort of purify our own relationships from our upper left quadrant, together as a community in the lower left, and in the lower right quadrant actually going to the scene itself and sort of reclaiming it with your heart — “I am going to push fear out of this supermarket and out of this parking lot. I’m not going to let this place sit in my shadow.” It’s almost to me like, you know, we obviously have our individual memories; and collectively, culturally, in terms of a community we have a memory. There’s a part of me that sometimes thinks that the spaces themselves have a memory. And when a particular place has bad memories associated with it, it starts to feel haunted. That’s literally a haunted house, there’s a haunting that takes place. And I think that making the pilgrimage, confronting this, being brave enough, courageous enough to take this in is, is sort of an exorcism in all four quadrants, really.

And to me, it goes all the way back to that meaning-making part, and how unfortunate it is that when it comes time to make meaning, that’s for the victims to do in the wake of something as horribly tragic as this. If we were front-loading that a little bit more in our culture, if we were actually doing things together in our culture to generate meaning in the first place, we might not have people falling through the gaps like this. But it’s only in the wake of tragedy that we tend to spend so much time making meaning for ourselves. My heart is aching for more cultural meaning in general, so that people didn’t have to feel so isolated, so alienated to the point where they feel like their only solution here, the only thing that makes meaning for them, is to show up in a public space with a gun and start pulling the trigger.