Damien Soitout
Grief and keep building belong in the same week. After 7 October 2023, a person who is not a witness can still continue the work.
The notebook is ordinary work. Grief does not require the notebook to close.
Public grief and the decision to keep building belong in the same week. On 7 October 2023, attacks in Israel filled the news within hours. The United Nations published, that day, an account of senior officials condemning the attacks. The Secretary-General, through his spokesperson, condemned the attack by Hamas in the strongest terms. The account speaks of horrific violence, of civilians killed and wounded, of people attacked and abducted from their homes, of rockets, and of a call that civilians be protected under international humanitarian law and that the abducted be released. The record is there for anyone who needs the account. I was not a witness. Most readers were not witnesses. On 12 October, five days later, the grief is still public, and the work on the desk in the picture is still there. Both are true. Pretending one cancels the other is how a week goes wrong in either direction.
One direction is to stop every ordinary task, as if a closed notebook at a distance were a form of respect. The other is to hurry past the grief into a program: a speech, a side, a use for other people's dead. A person far from the event does not acquire a mandate by refreshing a feed. What that person can do is narrower and harder. Feel the grief without costume. Keep building the thing you were already responsible for. Leave the scenes in the record, and leave the slogan unwritten.
Cruse Bereavement Support, on its page about understanding grief, says grief affects people emotionally and physically, and that it can affect mental health. It also says there is no single right way to grieve, and that who we have lost, the circumstances, and our own perspective all change the experience. Distance is a circumstance. The families who were attacked, and the families waiting for people taken from their homes, are living a grief I do not share and will not imitate. A reader in another country can still be shaken, sleepless, and unable to look away. That reaction is human. It is not the same reaction, and honesty begins by keeping the difference. Performing closeness you do not have is a way of centering yourself. Dropping the event because it is “over there” is a way of lying about what you saw on the screen. The middle is to let the news be as bad as the record says, and to let your own life stay the size it is.
Living after the death of someone you love is a different essay, for a private loss. Do not raid it for techniques to display a public one. Some of the same body is involved: sleep breaks, appetite moves, attention narrows. The National Institute of Mental Health, on its fact sheet about stress, treats a traumatic public event as a real external cause, alongside disaster and other shocks. Stress is the response to that cause. It can cost sleep. It can also, for a while, focus you. If the distress will not recede, if you cannot do ordinary things, or if you are thinking of harming yourself, the clinical door is the right door. NIMH's topic on coping with traumatic events is that door in the United States, beside a professional and, in immediate danger, 988. A blog post is not a counselor. Facing fear is useful only after you have told the truth about the scale. Fear for people you do not know is not cowardice. It is imagination doing its job. Imagination does not need a costume of closer knowledge than you have.
Keep building means the work that was already yours on 6 October is still yours on 12 October. A product, a class, a care, a page, a payroll, a meal for the people in your house. The notebook in the picture is that work. Closing it for a week does not restore a life in another country. It often becomes a way to feel loyal without doing anything the people in your care can use. Resilience is not numbness. It is the decision to remain able to help, including the small help of a finished task. Staying steady when the situation is bad is the same decision at the level of a day. Steady is not cheerful. Cheerful, this week, would be obscene if it were a performance. Steady is: I have seen the record, I am not a witness, I will not make a speech, and I will do the next honest piece of work.
The next honest hour has a shape you can name before you sit down. It is the meal you said you would cook. It is the shift you already accepted. It is the call you owe a colleague who is waiting on a date, not on your opinion of the news. It is the page that was due on Wednesday and is still due. A closed notebook can feel like respect from far away. Finished work is more useful to the people who depend on you. Grief does not improve because the invoice went out late. The people who were attacked are not helped by an unfinished afternoon in another country. Your household is helped when the afternoon is finished. That is the distinction between stopping as theatre and stopping because you are actually unable to continue. If you are unable, the clinical door is the right door. Inability is not a moral failure, and it is not solved by forcing a normal face onto a week that is not normal.
Gratitude on a week like this is easy to counterfeit and worth keeping in its true size. You can be glad of a safe street without announcing the gladness as a lesson to the bereaved. Thankfulness that becomes content is vanity. Thankfulness that becomes a meal, a finished shift, a kinder tone at home, is the right size. The people you do not manage, and still owe, are still owed this week. A public grief does not pause a child's dinner or a partner's need to know you are present. Presence is building. It is also the opposite of disappearing into a feed and calling the disappearance solidarity.
How to carry the news from far away, one month on, will be the question when the first shock has become a duration. This week is not that month yet. This week is the decision not to spend the shock in one of the two wasteful ways. Do not stop the ordinary work as theatre. Do not convert the dead into a platform. If you give money or time, give it to a specific relief you have actually read, inside a limit you chose before the emotion spent the account. Put a ceiling on what you give is the same limit, learned in quieter Decembers. A ceiling is not coldness. It is how help remains help, instead of a mood.
In a house, at a desk, with a colleague who is shaken: the attacks happened, civilians were killed and taken, the record is public, we are not witnesses, we are going to finish today's work and we are going to be gentle with each other. That paragraph is enough. Adding a theory of history is how a conversation becomes a program. Adding detail you do not personally hold is how a conversation becomes a rumor with blood in it. The UN account is the citation. Your addition should be care and continuity, not color.
If a colleague wants to talk, listen for the length of a cup of tea and then return both of you to the task. Listening is not the same as adopting a position. You can say the day was terrible. You can say you are sorry for the people who were there. You can say you are going to keep the appointment you made. Those three sentences do not ask you to explain a region, a history, or a side. They ask you to stay a person other people can still work beside. A long argument in a kitchen, refreshed from a feed, spends the evening the household needed for dinner and sleep. The feed will still be there in the morning. The child, the partner, and the colleague will have had a worse night if you gave the feed the evening.
Protect an ordinary health week was the right plan on a quiet Monday. Parts of it still apply, scaled down, because a body in grief still has to sleep and eat if it is going to be any use. Do not demand a perfect plate. Do demand that you lie down, that you drink water, that you walk far enough to feel that you have a body in this city and not only a mind in a headline. The World Health Organization notes that stressful events and bereavement raise the risk of depression, and that staying connected is part of how people get through. Connect with the people who are actually in your life. Do not demand that they perform the correct sentence. Sit with them. Then go back to the notebook.
Grief, and the decision to keep building, are not opposites. The grief is evidence that you noticed other people's lives. The building is evidence that your own responsibilities did not expire when the news got large. On this Thursday, open the record if you have not read it, once, from the UN and not from a stranger's caption. Then close it and do the next hour of work you would respect on a normal Thursday. Call the person who is frightened. Feed the house. Leave the political program unwritten. The victims are not your material. The work in front of you is. Keep building that, without pretending the week was ordinary, and without pretending you were there.
