Smoke hangs heavy in the Spokane air.

I try to block out the images the ash or smoke represent. A burnt tree, an incinerated roof, a child’s toy, a home filled with reminders of this daily life, maybe even the life of a beloved dog or cat.

So many homes lost. So high the cost of time, money, repair, so much so it feels not only daunting but almost insurmountable.

Loss— the etymology meaning absent, or the experience of something once expected, relied on, something needed, no longer there.

Loss reminds the senses again and again this is not a bad dream but a new reality. Not just a lost item, a lost photo, a lost home, but also the loss of our memories, dreams, security, a sense of the way things were and the suffering that something has altered the future by this loss in an irrevocable and permanent way.

And then grief ensues.

Grief surprising, smothering, blanketing like smoke leaving the hopeless realization that this is the new normal.

The etymology of grief comes from gravitas, heaviness, an overwhelming emotion difficult to surmount, difficult to arise from because of the breadth, the depth of its weight.

Here in Spokane, a town suffers collectively. Swaths of total destruction, total loss, and the overwhelming demand of time, money, and work needed to rebuild or replace what will never truly be the same.

As I survey the damage, I consider the cost of loss and grief in my own history. My family has been punctuated by profound loss. My maternal grandmother lost her first child six days after birth to jaundice. She was inconsolable to the point the doctor believed she might not live. So he asked for her help.

A small abandoned baby in his care had failure to thrive. The time needed to help this child fell beyond his time and ability. He brought the very ill child to my grandmother, despondent, bedridden, lifeless and pleaded with her to help him save this child.

She rose and went to work carefully feeding this child another mother had discarded.

Loss leads to grief and grief often to suffering. To suffer originates from the words to bear up and endure under a heavy weight. Suffering changes our mindset, it even gets passed down through the generations.

Dr Robbie Paul traced trauma through her generational lines beginning with her native nation’s first contact with white settlers. Her findings show catastrophic loss continues on or around the exact days of the previous generational trauma. The letter arriving announcing the death of a beloved child at boarding school, corresponds with a family suicide on the exact same date, a DUI, a mental breakdown— all the same date, the pain passing down the generations.

And what is the antidote for suffering?

Many have sought it in a type of high or a bottle, or simply to shut everyone and everything out. My grandmother turned grief into fear. She became “nervous Nelly”. She believed somehow if she could worry about any possible scenario, she could prevent it from happening.

C.S. Lewis wrote he was surprised how much grief feels like fear. My grandmother stuck in her grief became afraid and her worry felt like control to her. It was her bottle, her escape, her talisman against the next suffering. It wasn’t until the doctor handed her a task greater than her own personal pain, she was able to live again.

And I, a generation or more removed, still want to control my future through worry; prepping, planning, mapping, anything to avoid the work of grieving or suffering.

C.S. Lewis also speaks of his surprise of the ennui of grief, the lethargy that smites the will to do anything but escape by means of any momentary distraction disguised as pleasure.

Instead, the antidote is doing real work instead of escaping. Real work instead of endless worry.

That is the crossroad— the courage to realize the loss, grief, suffering cannot be born alone.

It begins by the work to muster the courage to ask for help. That courage leads to the miracle of others willing to shoulder the burden.

C.S Lewis writes, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” —

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.

– 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

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