No One Grieves Alone

December 21, 2023

Beloved Meteor readers,

Over the last few months of this year, a question has been kicking around my brain like a Victorian ghost on the Yorkshire moors—and maybe you’ve been asking yourself the same thing:

What does it mean to find joy in a time marked by such unimaginable sorrow?

I probably don’t need to explain the extent of the global tragedy, but for starters: the ongoing war in Ukraine; the worsening living conditions for people in Afghanistan and Iran; the concurrent humanitarian crises in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, of course, Gaza; the extreme weather events that have displaced millions.

All the while as these tragedies unfolded, those of us who had the privilege of distance were asked to do one thing: bear witness.

It was the least we could do, and yet, I felt guilty every time I chose to look away and take a “break” from the endless barrage of devastating news.

But it was a personal tragedy this year that forced me to face a grief I couldn’t avoid.

While walking home one night in July, my dear friend Anthony Gonzalez had a verbal altercation with a young man. After a heated exchange, the young man pulled out a gun and shot Anthony in the head.

I learned about the shooting the next morning. I remember that day with haunting clarity. My five-month-old hadn’t slept all night, and I had spent the early hours irritated, arguing with my husband while he was at work. When he got home, all he could manage to say was, “They shot him.” Anthony had been rushed to the hospital. No one seemed certain of his condition, and visiting hours wouldn’t start until late afternoon. Even if we could get in to see him early, we lived in a different state; we needed to know what was happening immediately.

I called my mom, who still lives in the Bronx and could get to the hospital sooner. She was on her way to work. “There’s been an accident. Don’t get on the train,” I told her.

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) ANTHONY, MY MAMA, ME, MY HUSBAND AT AN OBSTACLE COURSE RACE IN 2016. ANTHONY HATED RUNNING BUT HE HATED MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING FUN MORE.

Hours later, baby in tow, we made it to the hospital where my mom was waiting along with hundreds of Anthony’s family, friends, and co-workers from Local 28, the Tin Knockers union. The lobby was so crowded, I heard a nurse ask if someone famous had been admitted. Anthony was so annoyingly charming—of course he would draw a crowd. “Wait ‘til I tell him how many people are down here,” I remember thinking.

A family friend who worked at the hospital (the Bronx can be small) took me to see him. “It’s not good, mami,” he told me quietly in the elevator on the way. And he was right. There were so many tubes and wires coming out of Anthony’s body—and the dried blood on his bandaging was deep blackish-green.

A few days later, the call came in from a friend who was at Anthony’s bedside—he was medically brain dead. His organs were to be donated and the machines keeping his heart beating would be turned off.

We didn’t want to believe it.

To anyone following the local news, Anthony was just another faceless victim of gun violence. He was a statistic.

But Anthony was a person. He was a son, a father, a brother, a friend—the type of guy who went out of his way to take care of others. He and my husband had been a dynamic duo for 20 years. When I first met my husband, Anthony was there. When we got married, Anthony was there. He was so much a part of us that I called him my sister-wife. (Or, as I joked on Instagram once: Anthony was first wife in the streets, but I was first wife in the sheets.) When I got pregnant, Anthony would ask, “How’s my niece?”

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) ME, MY ARCH NEMESIS WHO I LOVE AND DEPLORE WITH THE FIRE OF 1000 SUNS, MY HUSBAND, FREDDY, AND ANTHONY AT MY ENGAGEMENT PARTY IN 2018.

After his death, I pushed my grief as far down as I could manage, piling everything else in my life on top of it. I was a new-ish mom in the middle of buying a house and trying to focus on the “more important” work of covering the bigger things going on in the world. It felt selfish to be caught up in my own sadness when there are things that feel so much worse happening in the world—mass killings, mothers holding their babies for the last time, families separated, houses destroyed.

In the face of all that, my pain felt insignificant. But the more room I made for others in my heart, the more empathy and anger I felt for their injustices, the more apparent it became that I was a fool for trying to minimize my own personal loss.

There is nothing bigger than the loss of life—even if it’s just one life. When we read the headlines about masses of people losing their lives and homes, we become blind to the reality of a single person and what their life meant. The news cycles can obscure a person’s humanity. Turn them into a number. Anthony’s obituary couldn’t capture who he truly was, how much his mother and child loved and depended on him. But those things were true, just as they are true for every one of the millions of people taken too soon this year.

It took the world imploding to make me understand that mourning one person was just as valid and necessary as mourning thousands. And pushing away my personal grief in exchange for communal grief meant I was also pushing away from another feeling, one that I needed to make sense of Anthony’s loss: joy.

Anthony oozed joy. (He also oozed Hennessy, and I never missed an opportunity to tease him about it.) He wanted to make people laugh. He loved all of us so fiercely, even when it was hard. He was simultaneously the most dependable and flakiest person on earth. He’d be the first person to bail you out of jail, but if you asked him to show up on time for Christmas dinner? You’d have better luck seeing a flying reindeer.

It can feel impossible to find joy in this moment—especially if, for one reason or another, you feel like you don’t deserve to be happy. In a piece about how the war in Gaza has been documented on Instagram, Zaina Arafat wrote in New York Magazine that she searches for signs of normalcy amid the destruction. Her uncle’s Gazan wife once told her, “During Gaza’s many wars, people would often go to the beach after a bombing to celebrate the fact that they were still alive. Joy is its own form of resistance. It allows people to sustain.”

I echo her sentiment. My sorrow was debilitating, and there are moments when it still is. But then, I see the pictures on my refrigerator of me, my husband, and Anthony embracing each other and making silly faces at a wedding, and I feel grateful to have that memory.

ONE OF THE PHOTOS ON MY FRIDGE OF THE THREE OF US AFTER [REDACTED] SHOTS.

There’s a line in the Quran that says, “Verily with hardship comes ease.” And a similar line in the Bible: “Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.”

Many of us have not made it to our ease. I know I haven’t. But joy? It can find its way to us every time we open our eyes.

So, with a hurting heart, I ask you to join me in the toughest end-of-year challenge: choose joy. Choose the joy of fighting instead of the sorrow of defeat. Choose hope over hopelessness. Choose joy so often that it emanates from within you, and you can share it with others.

Beyond all of the horrors we’ve seen is a day of healing. A day of telling our stories and ending them with something good.

I hope to meet you all there.

-Shannon