Personal Grief in the Face of Public Tragedy

Anyone who has ever experienced the death of someone they care about, particularly when sudden or unexpected, will talk about the unbelievable pain that is too heavy to carry, though you have no choice; the jarring dread that hits you when you allow your brain to consider that this person is gone; trying to comprehend the permanence when there is no other permanence like it to help us better understand. If you’ve ever walked around shaking your head until you have a headache trying to make sense of it, you know this feeling.

We didn’t know Kobe Bryant personally. We may have very complicated feelings about him as a person. But he was a person whose presence appeared to be permanent. Much like our own lives, we don’t often think about them being impermanent. I’ve already heard a lot of, “I don’t know why this is effecting me so much”. The disbelief, the jarring reality, the understanding of the agony several families and hundreds of friends are feeling today is familiar. It brushes right up against that raw nerve that we’ve experienced ourselves.

Many of you are coming up on traumatic anniversaries, recovering from a painful holiday season without a loved one, are coping with unimaginable loss in your own lives. Be gentle with yourselves if you’re wondering why the loss of an icon, yet someone you didn’t know personally is effecting you so much. Of course it is. Take good care of yourselves in the coming days, talk about it, allow yourself the time to grieve as you need to. We can hold space for each other’s grief when public tragedy reignites our own.