Follow Up On Grief

I happened to catch a piece on 20/20 last night about the realities of my last post. The piece was called "Living On The Edge", and it was about the crisis of ordinary people who have, or who are at serious risk of, losing their jobs and homes. These are people perhaps very much like you and me, that is, they are educated, solidly middle class families with children, who a short time ago were nicely employed as accountants, managers, even surgeons, and who are now either living in homeless shelters, or very close to losing their homes and to exhausting whatever savings they may have had.

Some of the children of these families made a video with the help, and at the request of their high school teacher. They called it "Is Anyone Listening?", and posted it on Youtube. It was a video of them sharing their feelings about what was happening to them and to their families, and it caught the attention of President Obama, who referred to it in one of his speeches, and who subsequently visited these teenagers at their school, to let them know that, indeed, someone was listening, and was trying to do something about fixing the disaster that was affecting so many people today.

The feelings expressed by these kids in their video certainly included the grief that I referred to in the previous post. They spoke openly, cried on camera, and or many, the experience of being able to share what was going on for them - which they had never done before - allowed the arousal of a new hope, and a sense that they were not alone, and that they no longer had to hide what was happening to them and to their families.

Please take this as an object lesson. Getting support for your feelings, even when you are not in as desperate a situation as these families are, is of the utmost importance in these extraordinary times, as it always is.



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