I am writing this in the past. Therefore, this moment in which I am writing is now historical. An archive. And even though I am writing right now in what will become the past about a moment that has not yet happened, this is a work of neither science fiction nor prediction. And yet, I am writing about a moment I cannot yet predict. About how many moments are unpredictable, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be prevented or elected to be different than we might hope.
The day on which I am sharing this with the world—the now now—is the day after an election.
The day on which I am sharing this with the world is also the day my best friend from graduate school died. It is the seventh year anniversary of her death. And it was also that same day that I attended the funeral of a family friend, and a United States senator’s head blocked me from seeing the bema in full, as he sat two rows in front of me in the Manhattan synagogue pews.
Which is to say that for me, November 6 is forever for me a day about America and death. The New York City Gay Men’s Chorus serenaded the pallbearers as they carried the casket out of the synagogue because the bereaved—may her memory be for a blessing—had been actively involved as a volunteer and benefactor amidst the AIDS epidemic and crisis from early on.
Hours later, after the pallbearer serenade, I’d sit on the floor of a friend’s apartment while she was at work, charging my phone in the wall outlet, when I’d get a text message summoning me to Long Island because my best friend from graduate school was most likely going to die.
And so I skipped the aforementioned family friend’s shiva to hop a train to Long Island and arrive at my beloved’s bedside, having missed her last breath, but still arriving in time to stand there with her beloveds and her body, as I felt her spirit begin to lift into another realm.
I do not think things are always predictable, and yet, I am a clairvoyant. I am highly intuitive.
But I cannot say today when I write this piece of prose what I think will happen on November 5 that will then yield what will be happening on November 6, 2024, the day in which I share this.
The now now.
But I do think it is possible to curve the predictable by electing the preventable.
And right now, no matter what happens with the election that has not yet happened when I am writing this but will have happened by the time I share this, I believe we are electing death.
I think about the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, and as it raged onwards. I was born in 1983. I remember enough to remember enough. I believe we could have elected to prevent those deaths.
And not just by the people we elect to hold positions of power in things like a government.
I mean as a society.
As a society, no matter what happens with this election, which has not yet happened when I am writing this piece, we are still electing a society and world that is constantly electing death.
I cannot write it any more clearly than it happened. I doubt anyone would choose my November 6, 2017, even in a fictionalized piece of work. I imagine few might believe it would make sense to have someone go to a funeral, gear up for a shiva, and skip the shiva for another death.
But that’s what happened.
And that’s a little bit too on the nose for us to fictionalize.
But in real life, a lot of people die every day. And a lot of that death is preventable.
In real life, we elect death every day.
We elect systems that allow people to die.
We elect behavior that allows people to die.
We elect choices that birth more choices that ultimately land in lots of death.
But we don’t have to elect for it to happen.
And yet, we do.
To elect something is to carefully select it. To choose.
So too, something elected can be “chosen for salvation through divine meaning.”
And yet in a world where we keep choosing and electing death, where we keep actively choosing and electing each other’s grief, what in the name of salvation are we thinking is divine?
Are our lives not divine?
Is it not holy and sacred and miraculous that people can be born and birthed at all?
Elect comes from the Latin “ex,” out, and “legere,” to pick. To pick out. To choose. To choose.
I’m wondering what happens when we build a world where we choose to elect birth, as much as possible. Where birth and creation become the foundation for the systems that run our world.
And be clear, I support reproductive choice, unequivocally. In fact, I believe that blocking a person’s ability to choose whether or not to remain pregnant is, unequivocally, a kind of death. That the freedom of choice is the birthing of possibility itself. That blocking choice too is death.
You’d think that given the fact that we have humans on this planet at all—that any of us are here—means we are electing birth. All 8.2 billion of us. And yet we let each other die.
In fact, we don’t only let each other day, we watch each other die. Click. Click. Click.
Because no matter what happened yesterday—as in the day before the now now—there is still a new world to continue to birth. Build. There are still ideas and possibilities yet to be birthed.
And with that, so too the death of what has been will also come.
And I wonder, having experienced so much grief throughout my life, having had so much death in my immediate inner circle pile up on top of itself, while also watching so much death in the world at large pile up on itself, what—if anything—might we actually have to grieve if we let go of a world the elects death. And poverty. And mass incarceration. And police brutality. And police. And carceral punishment. And mass violence. And war. And famine. And abuse.
Will we actually grieve those things not if, but when, they are gone?
And so what kind of miraculous death might we manage to co-create when we birth a world, when we elect to birth a world, rooted in collective liberation, rooted in collective access, rooted in collective abundance, rooted in collective care? Might we invent a kind of death—a death of death-perpetuating systems—that actually birth a kind of grief-less death?
Because I don’t imagine that I will mourn the loss of mass incarceration.
I don’t imagine that I will mourn the loss of mass violence.
I don’t imagine that I will mourn the loss of systemic oppression.
Racism.
Transphobia.
State-sanctioned violence.
Sexual assault.
Abuse.
Rape.
And maybe, once we birth a world rooted in the birthing of possibility, we’ll be able to mourn what we have already lost. Which includes each other. Which includes our loved one’s lives.
Which includes what we have already done.
We have already done so much electing of death.
I pray that we elect to birth anew.
And I’m promising myself, right here right now, that I’m not editing anything.
I’m not changing a goddamn thing about what I’ve written.
I’m rooting this in the knowing that no matter what happens on the day that has not yet happened, no matter who we collectively choose to elect, I know, unequivocally, no matter what, that we will still have to elect each other, we will still have to elect ourselves, in order to live.
Subscribe to "my word(s)"
Receive bi-weekly posts from Caroline’s "my word(s)" blog.