Grief does not change me, it reveals me.

In my life, writes Anne Lamott,  I will lose someone I can’t live without, and my heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that I will never completely get over the loss of something I loved, or the shock of something I could not imagine.

But this is also the good news.

The people and things I lost will  live forever in  a broken heart that may not ever quite seal back up. And I will come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but I learn to dance with the limp.”

I did not know a single one of the hundreds of people killed, maimed and wounded in Las Vegas last night. I do not have enough empathy in my soul to grasp what they are enduring and must endure.

This was a horror I never quite foresaw or imagined in my country, although I knew quite well that it happens again and again, all over the world, and has for centuries.

I can’t really mourn people I don’t know, but I can feel for those they left behind, and I can grieve for the idea of a country where I always felt safe.

And I can lament the loss of a government that will protect its weakest and most vulnerable people, that will protect me.

I mourn for my smugness and privilege and certainties. These are not the things that could happen to me here, in this wonderful country.

Today, I have lost something, an idea I never thought I could or would live without, and my heart is broken, and my sense of my world is shattered. The bad news is that I will never completely get over the shock of it, something I could not imagine.

But there is good news, and this is what it is. I came through it and will come through it. It may be a wound that never heals perfectly, but I can dance with a limp.