Grief is a complex thing. It is not a challenge that we should expect to “work through”, but simply a companion to learn to walk alongside. Our responsibility as a community, when tragedy strikes, is to simply show up for each other, to hug each other when we need a shoulder to cry on, to encourage each other when we are down, and to once again, eventually, learn to laugh with each other even though it feels counter to the process of mourning. The best of communities do this, and yet there will always be a grief-sized hole that we will never quite figure out how to fill.

When our school community experienced an unthinkable tragedy in 2018, and then again in the summer of 2024, dozens of resources, comments, and words of encouragement were shared. One podcast stood out as incredibly relevant to the emotions we were experiencing. “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” is a podcast hosted by Nora McInerny, author of the best selling book It’s Ok to Laugh (Crying Is Ok Too), in which she discusses tragedy in her own life, and how she has sought to be honest about her emotions in its wake.
Each of McInerny's podcasts gets to the heart of the sadness, grief, and awkwardness that surrounds our broken humanness. As her podcast description notes, “You know how every day someone asks ‘how are you?’ And even if you’re totally dying inside, you just say ‘fine,’ so everyone can go about their day? This show is the opposite of that.” If your community is experiencing tragedy and working to navigate grief, take time to listen to a few episodes of this podcast when you feel like you are ready.
McInerny discusses this internal struggle with the role grief should play in her life in the first episode of her podcast. “Grief is my constant companion. And I don’t totally hate it, either. It’s the bruise I get to push. A pain that reminds me what I had, and lost, is real. It’s the price I pay for loving deeply, for letting myself be loved. Happiness, love, is so much easier to demonstrate than grief. So much easier to see. And something about that made me really uncomfortable. I feared my own judgment. If I was happy, I must not be sad anymore. If I’m not sad anymore, I must not have loved him.”
Perhaps one of the most complex emotions we are capable of experiencing as humans is this simultaneous feeling of grief and joy. Rarely do we allow ourselves to experience both in their fullness, feeling as though when our basin is filled with grief, there is no room for joy. And yet, it is so important to be able to live as an individual, and as a community, with our brokenness without compromising our capacity for wholeness. This is one of the hardest things for a community experiencing tragedy to navigate. How do we honor someone’s life? How much are we supposed to mourn before we can allow joy to enter our life again? Are we lingering appropriately in each stage of grief?
The answer is frustratingly simple: there’s no playbook, no instruction manual for grief. It is, and will always be, Just us wrestling with our emotions, and reaching out to others to process those feelings. Simply knowing we are not alone, that we have friends, mentors, counselors, and family to reach out to, and that we are not ‘wrong’ for how we are feeling, regardless of the emotions we are experiencing, helps us more fully understand that we will never entirely leave grief behind. We will make room for it, accept it as part of our story, without letting it define us.
When communities are most effectively communicating through crisis, we allow space and time, and talk openly about our relationship with grief. When we experience loss we come to realize the love we have to give is not finite. As any parent knows, when you have a second child, you do not love your first any less. Our capacity to love miraculously grows as we invite others into our lives. When we lose someone, we must remind ourselves their impact on our lives is not compromised the moment we allow ourselves to experience joy again, whenever that may be.
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Scott Allenby is the Founder of Backroad Strategy Group and serves as the Chief Strategy and Resource Officer at Proctor Academy, a coeducational boarding and day high school in Andover, New Hampshire.
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