A Compassionate Legacy of Grief & Trauma
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The legacy of grief and trauma is the aftermath of survival and recovery following an inciting event. For nearly a decade, I’ve been living in this legacy. Avielle, the firstborn of my dear friends, was murdered by America’s celebrated weapons of war, and Jeremy, her father, would go on to die by suicide. These events were bookended by the grief and trauma of my best friend’s suicide and my father’s untimely death.
The legacy of grief and trauma is filled with far-reaching ripple effects that are equally devastating. When it feels like the world has moved on, community, with boundaries defined by compassion and human connection, serves as a stabilizing force to carry the burden of the everlasting wake of survival and recovery.
At some point in our life we will encounter grief and possibly, experience trauma. This year presents an unusual phenomenon of collective suffering on a national scale. Many of us are dealing with forms of grief and trauma as we are confronted by the pandemic, rising social injustices and disparities, economic challenges, and a divisive administration lacking compassion. As a first generation Indian American, I have been at a loss for what our country’s current trajectory means for the sacrifices my parents made.
Our country’s values have fallen out of alignment with my own and what I want for my kids.
Seemingly endless, this acute period will pass. I worry more about the aftermath, because this legacy cannot be navigated without compassion and human connection. As a clinical scientist and pediatric nurse, grief and trauma are familiar concepts and compassion is at the core of my work. After this storm, recovery will require space, time, and compassionate communities and leadership who will shoulder the burden of rebuilding. We need to pause and ask ourselves if we have this in our lives. Are we supported by the strength of compassion?
Our ability to interact with compassion, to receive and give it, is uniquely human, and makes us humane. I have seen this up close at the Avielle Foundation, the organization born out of the nightmare that transpired on December 14, 2012, when Avielle was murdered alongside 19 other first-graders and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Cradled by the world’s compassion, our community embarked a mission to build compassion and prevent violence.
I was one of the first to meet and hold Avielle shortly after her birth, my dear friends Jennifer and Jeremy’s first child. Jennifer is like a big sister whom I look up to with fierce respect and Jeremy was rough around the edges; he intimidated and challenged me like a father figure. Together, they were a grounding force in my life. There was nothing spectacular about those early years of our friendship, except for how this family welcomed me into their home with unfiltered love and warmth, and kept my 20-something self out of trouble.
After the shootings, compassion moved me to help my friends start the Avielle Foundation, seeking ways to prevent this from happening again. I wanted to help because they had helped me. I had also been reeling from my best friend’s suicide, and the Aurora movie theater shooting was just months before in the community in which I lived and worked as a nurse. I could only imagine what my friends were going through having had a shooting occur so close to home.
Many of us cared to imagine what it would be like to lose the person you love the most in a most horrific way.
Unfortunately, many wouldn’t imagine, and we saw pain arise where compassion lacked. In the early days after the murders, Jennifer would lay on the floor sickened by those who kept telling her they couldn’t imagine what they were going through. The words “I can’t imagine what you are going through,” are isolating and break human connection. “You can imagine…” was our Foundation’s first quip to inspire people to seek common ground and consider empathy. Amid our legacy of grief and trauma, compassion fueled the transformation of our pain, fear, and anger into the good work of the Avielle Foundation.
The science of prevention offers great hope in transcending humanity’s propensity towards violence and its devastating effects. Our work is grounded in compassion as a violence-prevention strategy because it is a protective factor. As its antithesis, violence occurs where compassion lacks, and once it occurs it is extremely difficult to fight its ripples, the long-lasting effects that are mercilessly expressed in its wake.
Soon after the murders, Jeremy and I developed an unexpected bond. He was kind, gentle, and loving… a stark difference from the man that scared me years before. I now think this softening was really a weakening from the trauma of his daughter’s murder. For our community, the most blunt reveal of the ripples of violence appeared on March 25th, 2019, when Jeremy, my friend and mentor, died by suicide.
Once again, our compassionate community came forward to shoulder the burden, this time to protect Jennifer and the kids from further fallout. After Avielle’s murder, Jeremy dedicated everything to building his little girl’s legacy, and by all measures the Foundation was successful. Now, the Foundation’s future was in question, and we wanted to honor the generosity of our supporters, but at greatest risk were the lives touched by Jeremy and Avielle.
Unsurprisingly, many turned to Jennifer for answers, but finding answers was impossible with trauma and grief entangled in the weight of success left behind. I took on running the Foundation, to help shoulder that burden, and we made the criticized decision to pause our activities. This difficult choice turned out to be a feat of compassion, to untangle the business from our emotional suffering, allowing space to understand and inviting compassion to cradle the pain, fear, regret, and anger of this horror.
Since our Foundation came to a tumultuous halt over a year ago, we continue living in this complex legacy. I will forever be grateful for everyone that has helped shoulder the many burdens along this journey: your sacrifices and selflessness bolster the process of survival and recovery. But the landscape of the aftermath of grief and trauma is harsh and relentless. Some continue to transform pain into good work, but others struggle. For some, the pain is too great, and the effects of trauma and violence are persistent. We have and will continue to lose lives until we can fully prevent and eliminate violence as a facet of humanity.
As our recovery and fight for survival continues, I can’t help but see parallels to the grief and trauma our country is experiencing. Except, on this larger scale, universal compassion is missing and communities have been fractured.
It has become clear how the insidious absence of compassion, particularly in the highest levels of leadership, unleashes hate, racism, and violence, and edges America to a breaking point. The experience is worsened by an apathetic administration in a pandemic that has stolen the lives of 230,000 Americans, and counting, and robbed us of human connection. When leadership is incapable of leading by example, it becomes personally challenging to feel compassion for each other, to offer phrases like “I can imagine what you are going through.”
Amid an uncontrolled pandemic, economic challenges, resurgence of civil uprising, and increasing violence in our communities, a shadow pandemic has established itself, where brain and mental health are severely compromised. As the Avielle Foundation begins its next chapter, its mission will continue to counteract this shadow pandemic. But on an individual level, we have to fight for a foundation of universal compassion, and step-up as a national community to compassionately share the burden of a collective legacy of grief and trauma that’s coming for us all.
You can imagine how compassion can prevent this legacy from becoming a vicious cycle where ripples become waves of further devastation. With so much out of our control, we will always have this superpower: our uniquely human ability to interact with compassion, to offer it in our homes and communities, and appeal for its reinstallation at all levels of leadership.
For Dad, Louis, Avielle & Jeremy, and all of our little Unicorns.
If you’re in crisis, help is available.
Suicide is a major public health problem and a leading cause of death in the US. If you’re in crisis, there are options available to help you cope. You can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at any time to speak to someone and get support. For confidential support available 24/7 for everyone in the US, call 1–800–273–8255 or visit https://go.usa.gov/xftYC.
