The thing I always end up thinking about on Tisha B'Av is the concept of mourning and how TIRED you get when you're mourning someone or something. You're just... drained. Your arms and legs feel like they're moving through wet sand.

1/

Mourning is WORK, the work of processing all of your loss and anger and sadness into a form which will allow you to move on with your life, or at least move on to the next stage.

We don't treat it like it's work in our modern world.

2/

If we get any time off from work at all, it's maybe 3 days. People who haven't dealt with sudden loss are confused when mourners don't just BOUNCE BACK as though mourning takes as long as a weekend trip to the shore.

Your whole body mourns. It takes everything you have. 3/

I find so much comfort in the concept of shiva and shloshim, in this setting-aside of a sacred space in time where the only real responsibilities of the bereaved are to mourn. Others in the community are called upon to center the mourners and their grief. 4/

It is a profound difference between the style of mourning that I grew up with, where mourners are expected to play host, to display their mourning correctly.

Jewish tradition understands the WORK that mourners are putting in, and centers that. 5/

(Of course not perfectly as we are all human. I'm sure everyone has a story of an aunt or uncle who upended these intentions, but the intention remains.)

6/

A lot of us are in a prolonged state of mourning right now. We are mourning for Black lives (especially Black trans lives) not only ended but broken by a white supremacist police state. We are mourning for lives lost to COVID due to the horrible mismanagement of this crisis.

7/

We are mourning for the lives we lived, for the ability to gather with friends or simply go to the store without it being a production, for the disruption in the lives of our children, for the trauma we will all carry for the rest of our lives. 8/

Some of us mourn our hopefulness, our illusions, the feeling we may have had that even if we didn't think the people in charge had our best interests in mind, that they wouldn't look us collectively in the eye and say "we want you to die so we can make a few more dollars." 9/

Some of us mourn our comrades losing their naiveté and becoming as disillusioned as we are.

We mourn so much, constantly, right now. It's just an endless state of loss, exacerbated by those who should be ameliorating it. Made worse by those we trusted to make it better. 10/

And so on Tisha B'Av, I think about how we have survived cataclysmic events before, how we have always changed and adapted, but *also* I think about our need to honor our loss, and to truly honor that we are mourning, and to recognize that mourning is work. 11/

Mourning is physical, it lives in our blood and our muscles and our bones. We have to make space for it so we can heal from it.

Please, don't hold yourself to an unrealistic standard. Recognize what you're mourning this year, and give yourself permission to do so. 12/

Don't hold yourself to modern standards of mourning. You're not going to be over ANY of this in three days, and you shouldn't be!

Let yourself deal with your grief however helps you heal, and don't be mad at yourself if that healing is as physical as it is mental. 13/

Grief is tiring work. 14/14