Partway through her concert in Boston, Sara Bareilles stopped to talk about a grief she did not realize she had been carrying. She knew she was grieving the loss of two close friends. She knew she was grieving her challenges conceiving a child. What she hadn’t realized is that she had deep grief for her country. A country she says she loves deeply.
And so, she did what songwriters do. She wrote a song about it. It’s called Heartland. More on that song later.
First, I want to go back to a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert that I have referenced before. Colbert says something about anger that helped me connect a few things that had been swirling around in my busy little head.
He says we often close the door on grief with anger. And then he says this.
“Anger is an armor against how we actually feel.”
If we look around our country right now, I think there is one thing we can all agree on. People are angry. Regardless of where people are on the political spectrum, we see anger everywhere.
But Sara, Anderson, and Stephen opened a door for me to think about it differently.
Maybe it isn’t anger. Maybe it’s grief.
Ask people what this country is supposed to be and the answers are not that different. Freedom. Opportunity. If I work hard, I can build a life better than my parents had.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most people in our country don’t think that they are getting that.
Some people are grieving work that meant something and then went away. A main street where the storefronts aren’t empty. The idea that if you did what you were told to do, it would add up to something.
Some people are grieving the belief that this country was slowly getting fairer. That the direction was at least right. That their kids would be treated like everybody else’s kids.
Those are not the same losses. But they are the same promise, broken in different places.
Now here’s the part that’s going to be harder to say.
I don’t think it matters much which side of this you’re on. I’m not saying the positions are the same. They aren’t. I have my own, and anyone who’s read me for a while can probably guess them.
What I’m saying is the thing underneath the anger looks the same to me no matter where it’s coming from. People lost something that mattered to them, and nobody gave them a way to say so, and it turned into rage.
Which brings me to the thing I believe most strongly and have the least evidence for.
The moment we start ranking whose suffering counts, we are in real trouble.
I’ve watched this happen in both directions. Somebody says they’re struggling and gets told other people have it worse. Which may be true. But it’s also the end of the conversation. And a person whose grief gets ruled out of bounds doesn’t stop grieving. It just gets channeled into something that will make them feel seen. Anger.
Now back to the song Heartland.
I believe it’s being sung in the voice of our country itself. Not a song about America. America talking.
And the thing that gets me about it is that it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. There’s a line in that song, “I have made grave mistakes still to be known.” It isn’t a song about a country that used to be perfect. It’s a song about one that’s still being made.
“I am the woman you make of me,” it says.
And then it asks to be broken down and built back up. It asks to be fought for. It says that’s the only way any of this survives.
Here’s why I think this song is so important right now.
Two people who can’t stand each other could listen to Heartland and both hear their own country in it. Both of them grieving a promise they felt was not delivered. Both of them for completely different reasons. Both of them telling the truth about what they lost.
That isn’t a problem with the song. It’s the most beautiful thing about it.
I first heard about the idea of grief needing a witness from Rob Reider in our Campfire Conversation.
Here’s how I think that might apply to grieving our country.
Think about how many people have been grieving something with nobody willing to look at it.
A man whose plant closed after 22 years, who gets told he’s had it easy. A mother who buried her son and then watched strangers argue online about whether his death mattered. A family that has been here for generations and still gets asked where they’re really from.
All of them grieving something real. All of them told, one way or another, that theirs wasn’t a loss worth talking about.
Here’s what worries me. A person whose grief nobody will witness doesn’t quietly accept that. They go find someone who will take it seriously.
And there are a lot of people willing to do that. Podcasts, politicians, people with enormous audiences. Some of them are acting in good faith. Plenty are not. The ones who aren’t have figured out something the rest of us keep missing.
If you hand a grieving person a target, they will feel better for a little while. It feels like being heard. But it’s not really the same thing.
That’s the trade a lot of people have made, and I don’t entirely blame them. Anger is available. Anger has a community waiting. Grief mostly has a room with nobody in it.
So, here’s the idea I keep landing on.
Being a witness to somebody’s grief does not require agreeing with them.
That’s a hard sentence for me to write and I suspect a hard one for people to believe. It’s easy to be there for someone whose loss makes sense to me. It is a different thing entirely to be there for someone I disagree with on almost everything and still want to hear what they lost.
I’m not good at this. I want to be clear about that. I have opinions and I have a temper about a lot of this. And I am not writing from a position of having figured it out.
So, here’s what I’m going to try.
The next time somebody’s anger lands on me, on a screen or across a table, I want to ask myself a different question than the one I usually ask. Not what is wrong with this person.
What might this person be grieving the loss of?
This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.