I want to share a very personal experience with you, one that has often resonated through my life, today and in the past,  in the hopes that it might be helpful to some of the good people suffering the same thing. I can feel your grief in the air, through the ether, in my bones and heart. I can breathe it.

This morning, I got up with Maria and we went outside to do the farm chores and feed the animals, as we do religiously every morning after sunrise. This is often when the sky and the light are the most compelling, as the sun rises over the Vermont hills a few miles away, and strikes the landscape.

Maria was out in the stall, feeding and grooming Chloe, I had taken the hay out to the sheep and donkey feeders, I had called Red and Fate out of the pasture and filled the heated water tub. I stood in the doorway of the barn, alone and out of sight, right where my alleged ghosts hang out in the barn. And I cried. It was just three or four sobs, and a few drops falling on my shirt, but it was, I recognized, an expression of grief.

it is what I do when I lose a friend, or a parent, or a dog. A short, intense, outburst of grief, it happens when I hear Bruce Springsteen sings “The River” and I look backward at my life and grieve for my losses and tragedies and disappointments.

God, I thought, I am grieving for the election.

This startled me, as I pride myself on my detachment and perspective. Like many men, I often confuse emotional suppression with manliness, when it is, in fact, quite the opposite. No one died, but it seemed to me that something I value very much did die, perhaps for a while, perhaps for good.

I had lost my idea of America – it was rejected by more than half of my fellow citizens –  some of my faith in our vaunted and cherished civic system. I lost the idea of our common pride in America as a sanctuary for the fearful and needy and enterprising of the world. I lost my idea of a President as a person with strong and enduring character.

I had lost my idea of balance of power, of checks and balance, of a humane and benign government. And my experience of feeling  safe here, and taking that for granted.

In the barn, I lost my detachment.

I respect the people who upended our system and trusted it to this damaged and angry man, and I see they are happy and hopeful. But I feel grief for what was lost to me.

Then, I sensed that so many people around me were grieving, and I remembered that I had written about grieving and researched it, for people, for dogs, I talked to shrinks and psychiatrists and social workers, scores of them, for articles on grieving for humans and for Going Home: Finding Peace When Animals Die.

One of the traumas of the election for the people who supported Hillary Clinton was the shock of it, there was no warning, no chance to brace or prepare. Well into the morning, the data site I had been reading for months said there was only a 16 per cent chance of Donald Trump winning. The pollsters say many of the people who voted for him were ashamed or uncomfortable to admit it, that is why the polls didn’t pick it up.

After these tears, I went and got the book and read some chapters, and I found that this was helpful to me. You do not need to buy my book, I am not selling or promoting anything here. It was understanding my feeling.

There are simple  steps you can take to deal with your grief, if that is what you feel.

And what are the symptoms of grief?

The medical dictionary says they include recurring and powerful feelings of sadness and yearning. Physical expressions of grief often include crying and sighing, yawning, headaches, loss of appetite, feelings of panic and loneliness, difficulty sleeping, weakness, fatigue, feelings of heaviness, aches, pains and other stress-related ailments. And anger, often taking the form of argument.

Grief is to be taken seriously, whether it is the loss of a person, a beloved animal, or a powerful idea that is a part of our consciousness. I have felt it many times in my life, as most of the people reading this have.

Millions of women went to sleep anticipating the celebration of the first female President, they woke up to a great and painful shock. They had no chance to prepare for it, and are still groping to understand what happened and why. And what the consequences are for our country. They are grieving for the idea of Hillary Clinton, among other things. And it was very much like a sudden death, one minute she was ascendant, the next gone.

This was my experience.

But as I became aware of it, I  remembered what I had learned. Grief is personal, often transformative.  It is painful, but also can be cleansing and liberating. It helps us move from one stage of life to another. You just have to accept it.  It strikes everyone in a different way, people can recover from it, but it is neither simple nor easy. It is hard.

Grief has its stages. Psychologists believe the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, in time, acceptance.

There is no fixed timeline for these stages, we are all different, have different attitudes and experiences, friendships, circumstances. My first response Tuesday night was denial, I felt angry in the middle of the night and depressed the next morning. And later, when I started writing about it, the first intimations of acceptance, I saw it in my writing, it felt better than grief.

Being active can be helpful, talking to friends, doing acts of kindness that make you feel better about yourself.  Stepping out of yourself. Understanding what you are feeling and why, no matter what your vote was. Finding someone you can trust to talk with.

Losing an election is not the same as losing a loved one, yet in some ways, the stages of grief can be similar. You may need to be aware and know yourself, as I am learning to do. T

This election was a stunning loss to many people, and if many do not understand why so many people could vote for Donald Trump in good conscience, so many of the people who did vote for him do not understand this grief others are feeling or empathize with it. This is the price we pay for being Two Nations, neither of which speak to the other.

This schism makes it all the more lonely and painful. To feel better,  one has to know and acknowledge what is wrong. If you are grieving, you will recognize the symptoms right away.

I mention this because I see that so many people are in great shock and fear and anger and I recognize these stages of grief, I saw it in me, I am feeling it still, and I have already seen and sensed it in many others. All you have to go is go look at a Facebook TImeline, grieving people are streaming past in a river of emotion, sadness and suffering.

I am not into drama or enabling, but I believe the grief in me was – is – very real – in Maria, too – and we are  understanding it in that way and treating it accordingly.  We are working to heal ourselves, being gentle with one another, and loving. I am walking in the woods, meditating. I am working to heal myself.

I expect we will be feeling this grief in differing ways for some time, there is no expiration date for grief, it has its own schedule. It could be gone tomorrow or here for weeks. I am not God, I can’t will it away.

I hope this is helpful, there are many good books on grieving, and of course, there is always a therapist. That’s where I got help when I fell into a dark hole grieving for my lost life.

I got it back.