Reflection on Grief and Resistance in America

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who writes from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

The first time I interviewed the internationally renowned children's author Kate DiCamillo, a teenager in Uvalde, Tex., had just killed 19 elementary school students and two of their teachers. I called Ms. DiCamillo because a post she wrote on Facebook told me she was grieving. I was grieving too. Surely, I thought, we were all grieving.

In our conversation, she told me about talking with some schoolchildren earlier that day. "They were all about the same age as the kids would've been in Texas, and I thought, 'I am so heartbroken,'" she said. "And then I thought, 'That's my job: to stay heartbroken, to stay heartbroken about this.'

Her words have been echoing in my mind for the last three weeks. This time it's not because of a school shooting -- although there was just another one in my own city -- but because nearly every hour of every day now, another cause for keening grief has erupted from a presidency built entirely for destruction.

What kind of president dismantles and threatens to shut down an agency that feeds hungry children? Or appoints as health secretary a crackpot vaccine skeptic at a time when avian influenza may be on the verge of human-to-human transmission? Or abandons efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even those that are more cost-effective than fossil fuels, just as climate-driven weather disasters are worsening?

What kind of president targets religious groups urging compassion toward immigrants and working to resettle refugees? Or rounds up people who came here to find work and puts them in a prison camp built for terrorists? All while blocking pathways to legal migration?

Until 2016, we lived in a democracy governed mostly by elected officials who loved this country and wanted to do right by it, even if they held sharply divergent views of "right." Now we live in a country governed by a party of cruelty, and often it feels like the only thing left to do is rage against the dying of the light. We have to stay heartbroken about this.

Fury is a powerful motivator of resistance, but there is only so much rage a person can harbor without nurturing something cold and still and hard in the place where a warm, living heart once beat. Already I am exhausted by my own fury, and the second Trump presidency is only three weeks old.

This is, of course, their plan.

Tuning out can feel like the only way to survive. But too many people are in immediate danger and can't afford to look away. They are counting on the rest of us to stand beside them, to flood our senators and representatives with emails and phone calls, to write letters to the editor, to march in public squares. Paying too little attention is what got us into this mess. We can't change what's already done, but we can let the anarchists know we're watching now.

But in these days of fury, I am also trying to keep my own heart soft, to follow Kate DiCamillo's lead and let it be broken. I am trying to set anger aside and give myself over to the simplicity of grief. The oligarchs are trying to kill my country and scavenge its bones, and if I can do nothing to stop them, at least I can bear witness. I can grieve.

The question is how a heart can be broken again and again and again and not fall into a fruitless desolation. How is it possible to protect a tender heart when it's dangerous to turn away from what is breaking it?

The party of rogues and reprobates is counting on us to look away. They need us to go along with our lives -- signing permission slips for school, planning a summer trip, wondering what Bitcoin is -- as though our democracy is not in mortal danger. As though so many of the people we live and work among, whose children sit next to our children in school, are not in mortal danger.

In truth, not one of us is safe. Depending on how much Congress and the courts let the Trump administration get away with, we are all just a mismanaged pandemic -- or an ectopic pregnancy, or a pre-existing condition, or a chemical spill, or a natural disaster, or a brewing world war -- away from calamity. No one voted for an administration that will leave them to fend for themselves in a disaster, much less one that threw the door open wide to it, but that's what we are getting.

In the time since I spoke with Ms. DiCamillo about the tragedy in Uvalde, nothing has been done to keep children safe from guns, and more children will suffer and die because of this administration's indifference to human anguish. So I emailed Ms. DiCamillo to ask if she had figured out yet how to keep letting herself be heartbroken without becoming broken forever.

"I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again, and over and over again something (the moon, an eagle, the snow) or someone (a kid who tells me that Despereaux makes them feel brave, a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild) will reach down to pull me out," she wrote. "I've learned to not resist these hand-holds. I've learned to let the beauty of the world and the bravery of other people pull me up and out of the despair."

I thought of Ms. DiCamillo when I read about the Democrats' Senate sit-in and the countrywide protests held last week. I thought of her when the F.B.I.'s acting director, Brian Driscoll, stood up to the bullies demanding the names of agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases; when security officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development refused to give Elon Musk access to internal systems; and again when Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, refused to step down after President Trump fired her on social media. All around us, brave people are fighting. Even if some of those fights prove to be doomed, they remind us that we know how to fight, and how to keep fighting.

All around us, too, is beauty -- art and music and stories, like the brave mouse in "The Tale of Desperaux," that make us feel brave, too; evergreens that shelter singing birds and hardwoods trembling on the verge of green; lighted planets lined up in a parade across the night sky; glowworms hiding deep in the leaf litter, waiting for warmth to turn them into fireflies; ponds with clouds scudding across their shining surface, and turtles sleeping deep in their soft mud.

Anger lets in too little beauty, but heartbreak? A tender heart feels the fury and the fear, the sorrow and suffering, the beauty and the bravery alike. In the years ahead, we will need them all.

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books "The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year," "Graceland, at Last" and "Late Migrations."