A reflection for the grieving changemaker

I woke up panting, blinking against the dark. I started to come back into my body, wiggling my toes and feeling the soft fabric of the bed sheets. 

A dream, I told myself. Just a dream. 

No ordinary dream, though, because it was the first time in my life that I had dreamt about my older brother, and it was jarring.  

Jarring because I never really knew my older brother. We only had 163 days together. Rory died in an accident three weeks before his third birthday. I was six months old. His absence has shaped my life far more than his presence ever did. In the dream Rory was vividly real and alive. But when I imagine him during waking hours, I don’t see him in my mind’s eye the way you do someone you see everyday. Instead, I feel him, like a memory that belongs to my body rather than my mind.  

The dream itself shouldn’t have been surprising. While promoting my new book, The Changemaker’s Toolkit – in which I share about growing up in the aftermath of Rory’s death – I’ve been connecting with many grieving people. Some whose lives have also been shaped by untimely loss. Some whose daily lives are shaped by the weight of our current world and inescapable fear for the future. Often, they’re the same people. 

I write and work for grieving, overwhelmed, frustrated, burned out changemakers. My role, as I see it, is to offer a sense of possibility. To help people believe that change is still within reach and that their efforts make a difference.

The question is this: how do I – how do any of us – provide a sense of possibility for the future without dismissing the valid and truly overwhelming weight of the current reality? 

The answer lies in how we think about hope and despair.

Very often, we think about hope and despair as a duality. They’re two sides of the same coin; you feel one or the other. One is often defined by the absence of the other: hope on one side of the coin – flip it over and there is despair. They’re connected, but they don’t co-exist. 

I think the exact opposite is true. Hope and despair are wound around one another like threads in a rope. You don’t only feel one or the other. You can feel both at the same time, because they come from the same place.  

The agonizing truth of driving social change – as in life – is that it is not all going to be okay. 

Injustice, inequality, and loss breed a grief that lasts. The days that pass provide time to sit with that grief, to get to know her, to become familiar with her patterns and pitfalls, maybe even to make peace with her. But she hangs around forever.

Which is why when you’re grieving – whether you’re mourning a person, a right, a policy, or a moral line in the sand – expressing sentiments that it’ll all be okay in the end can feel not comforting, but dismissive. 

What you need to know the most is that hope and despair are both born from love. It hurts because it matters. 

You weep at their gravestone because you always hoped for the best for them – from throwing their birthday parties to wiping their tears – and you can barely imagine this world without them. 

You feel sick over what’s happening in the world – the attacks on dearly held values and the sense that something is being irrevocably taken – because you care deeply about the place you call home, the opportunities it offers, and the protection it provides. 

It hurts because it matters.

The inescapable, overwhelming weight of grief can shadow conversations and punctuate daily routines, a constant soundtrack ebbing and flowing in the background. 

That quiet constant manifests so differently in different people at different times. The protestor and the doom scroller are both grieving. Both driven to the point of despair, both hoping that the world will become what it could be. 

What they both need – what we all need – is people to stand beside us through the heady experience of intertwined hope and despair. 

As fictional soccer-turned-football coach Ted Lasso tells us: “I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad, and that is being alone and being sad.”

The truth is that we’re all out here creating things for each other – books, businesses, organizations, initiatives, policies, events, protests, products, and programs. We do so to shape the world, but also to connect with the changemakers behind them. My hope is that books like mine and projects like yours can unite the grieving changemakers that need them. Unite us in despair and unite us in hope. 

When we do that, when we come together, the hope might not always brighten and the despair may not always dim. But we’re reminded that it hurts because it matters. So we keep going. Until it hurts a little less.