First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
"Things like this just don't happen here" and other lies we tell ourselves, especially around the holidays
Whenever I watch terrible true crime shows — which is often — I like to play a game where I try to notice all of the seemingly load-bearing cliches and tropes that are all but required in every single telling of an everyday tragedy in America.
You know the ones. Crimes seem only to happen in towns where “no one locks their doors” and only to beloved supermoms whose “smile could light up a room.” The perpetrator is always expected to be a monster, but the viewer is meant to be confounded when a regular person commits a heinous crime.
But the lesson that I’ve learned from the 30something years I’ve spent studying at Investigation Discovery University pursuing my PhD in “It’s Always the Husband” is this: The biggest fallacy that we tell ourselves is that “these things don’t happen here.”
And we tell ourselves that a lot.
Some other iterations of this delusion include:
These things don’t happen to us.
People like us don’t experience things like this.
You hear about these kinds of things, but you never think they’ll happen to you.
We tell ourselves this to preserve our sense of normalcy, innocence, and, to some degree, helplessness, for as long as humanly possible.
And this, of course, forces the ~ scholars ~ among us to ask: Then who do tragic things happen to? Who is the implied other here? “Bad” people? Poor people? Any person different than ourselves? Because statistically, every single human life is dotted with awful things of varying size and scope, so surely, they do happen to people like…everyone?
Some of this self-delusion masks deeply rooted racism, colonialism, and classism, but it’s also more generally a framework designed to insulate us from the reality that at any minute, on any day, any single thing that we take as a given could be changed or altered or ruined entirely. It’s built on a false meritocracy that teaches us to be good, act right, and you’ll be insulated from bad things.
This belief not only rids of anxieties and allows us to take quotidian risks like driving a car or sending out kids to school, it also, importantly, washes us of any responsibility for the Bad Things.
Which is why think the more honest statement isn’t that “these things don’t happen here/to people like me,” it’s that “I am consciously blocking out the idea that things like this can happen to me because if I don’t, I will become paralyzed with a kind of grief and anxiety that will make it impossible for me to live, and also, it would require me to potentially make different choices in my everyday life and I am not ready for that.”
It’s this delusion that allows us to continue to make plans and uphold cherished traditions. We need this belief — that bad things can’t and won’t happen to us — in order to dutifully put away the lights each year and think “next year, I will still be the same person I am now, chipper and unblemished by disaster.”
We literally cannot have “the holidays” if we think — realize, really — that in the next 12 months, the bad thing might come for us.
Because nothing ruins Hallmark Christmas Movie Season like a real-life tragedy that makes it so that Christmas is actually a huge bummer now.
Compounding this reality is the fact that we do so, so little to collectively prevent future tragedies. Climate denialism whose bill has finally come due and, as a result, has left already-vulnerable people without homes this holiday season. Car-centered design which all but guarantees a high rate of traffic deaths. A general willingness to entertain anti-science, anti-public health beliefs at all levels of governance. Maternal mortality rates that we seem to pretend are high due to intractable, uniquely American reasons.
Earlier this year, in fact, “we” (some of us, anyway), elected for even more disease, climate-related disasters, and poverty at this time next year, almost by default. There is very, very, very little chance that in December of 2025, there will be a large upswell of mirth and joy.
And again I ask: What kinds of things don’t happen here? Economic prosperity? Longevity? Earned optimism?
Which brings me to Christmas Day, 2023
Last year on December 25, I woke up late and ignored all of the messages in my phone while I scrolled Reddit and petted the dog. One of the purest joys of living in a DINKWAD (Dual Income, No Kids, with a Dog) household is that Christmas morning is a day off with nothing to do and nowhere to be and no one expecting anything of you. It is one of the most lovely, lazy, loungey days of the year.
But it wasn’t, because when I did finally look at the messages — messages I’d assumed were like, memes and the kind of mass “Merry Christmas!” notes some people still send — I learned that, at some point between when Keith and I were watching Die Hard and crushing Miller Lites and cackling amongst ourselves and that quiet late morning in our bed, independently pirate-eying our phones and acceding to Lola’s lackadaisical requests for further scratches, my grandfather had, as he would have said, “expired.”
On Christmas. And my first thought was “of course he died on Christmas. He would think that was so funny.”
And my second thought was “Well, December’s sure going to be different from now on.”
My grandfather, Gary Brooks Hanavan, a Marine who contained more multitudes than most people can even hope to imagine, was the last of his kind. He was a cross between R. Lee Ermy, Yosemite Sam, Jimmy Dugan, and Jeff Bridges (as Rooster Cogburn, not so much as the Dude…although, not NOT the Dude, either). He was my favorite person since before I remember what it meant to be a person and that day, that Christmas day, he was no longer a person. He was now a former person and a present-day situation to be dealt with.
His death wasn’t sudden and in fact I’d been grieving him for years, a little at a time. Not because he’d lost his mental faculties; one of the last times we visited him, in his trailer in Nowhere, Oregon, where he was almost entirely confined to an easy chair and an oxygen tank, he’d noticed that Keith was wearing a San Francisco Seals hat from Ebbets Field Flannels and told us about how he used to take the trolly from East Bay to watch the games as a kid. We didn’t need to fact-check him to know it was the truth, but we did it anyway and found out that everything he’d told us was true because it always was.
No, it was his body that was failing him. Slowly, he had become trapped in the vehicle that for so many years had been his tool; as a carpenter, as a cowboy, as a dancer, as a soldier, and as a dad.
That man, after a long fight against his own body and just about every organ in it, was gone. At last, on Christmas Day, all of it had failed him for the final time. The culmination of all of the little pieces that chipped away at his life — his circumstances, the realities of being a poor person in America — had finally failed him for good.
But the tragedy isn’t that he died in Christmas. No, the tragedy is that he was failed by the VA, by being a child born a decade after the Great Depression wiped out any generational wealth he may have stood to incur, by austerity measures that gutted Social Security, by union busting, by the people who said they were on the side of veterans and workers and rural folks and never were. He was failed by a lot of people who would have thanked him for his service and said they were voting on his behalf, and they would have been extremely incorrect.
He told me once about how, in 2020, he saw his neighbor who had a political sign up for “that draft-dodging loser” and his neighbor, assuming that Gary had similar voting tendencies, tried to commiserate.
“You and I are not on the same side, here,” my grandfather, who had wept when Kennedy was shot, told him.
Almost a year after he breathed his last labored breath, in November of 2024, I remember thinking that I was really, really glad he didn’t have to live through another four years of “the guy with the bone spurs.” But somehow, I doubt he’d have survived it. He only barely made it through COVID, and I suspect that was mostly because he and my grandmother were isolated, anyway.
See again: Poverty. See again: Circumstances.
He wasn’t alone. Some 40 million American seniors are facing significant economic challenges — and while plenty of media outlets are quick to write about how Baby Boomers are well-off and doing just fine, the fact is that octogenarians are not. They’ve been barely surviving off of Social Security for a lot longer than anyone ever expected, and as the cost of literally everything has increased, their benefits really haven’t. In a Next Avenue piece for Forbes, Joe Seldner wrote that “nearly half of all people of over 55…had no money saved and risked heading into poverty or certainly into dire conditions that would make their lives desperate for decades to come.”
“You might think — wrongly — they frittered away their money on bad decisions or poor planning. That's not so in most cases,” he explained. “Most arrived where they are later in life because of health issues or divorce or careers in industries that were drastically cut back or disappeared.”
Because winding up poor and dying in your chair on Christmas is, in fact, something that happens to people like us. It happens to people like almost everyone in America.
At no point in my life have I ever thought that “those things don’t happen to people like us” because lol they actually do happen exactly to people like us. People like us — both my actual family and people who I consider to be family in class and status — know nothing but “those things.” My grandfather taught me to fix things with whatever you had around, to use scrap metal and spare wood. He was handy because he liked to be and because he had to be.
He changed me as a person and then he changed my relationship with December. But grief and holidays are something I’d been marinating on for some time.
Three years ago, I wrote about the way that COVID was impacting people at the holidays and, specifically, how it meant a lot more grief around these times. Here’s some of that:
The unvaccinated people who, this year, will unpack a stocking from a cardboard box labeled "X-MAS DECORATIONS," inhale the smell of dust and pine and Bon Marche purchases of yore, and be overwhelmed by sadness, because the person who used to peer into this stocking on Christmas morning is in the ground. The ones who will complain of being "sick of mask mandates" on Friday and filled with sorrow on Saturday when a different relative has to cut the ham.
We are remarkably good at keeping our feelings and our reality separate. And we are so skilled and willfully avoiding connecting the outcomes with the causes, especially when the causes were ourselves. Like children, we cover our eyes and hope nothing can hurt us. We think that we can avoid empty chairs at our tables by ignoring the reasons they're empty.
When a terrible thing happens to you, there’s a feeling of disbelief. Then, slowly or maybe not slowly at all, there dawns a realization that everything, now, is different. There was you before the bad thing and now there’s you after the bad thing.
But too often, we take that different feeling and turn it entirely inward. Instead of examining the ways that we might help prevent future terrible things, we pull the grief to ourselves like a blanket.
We become the Kind of Person that These Things Happen To and that is our identity, but so seldom do we take it any further and ask: How could we keep others from joining this club? Is there nothing that could have been done to change this outcome?
In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum wrote about the need to both feel our own personal bad feelings while also looking outward for next steps. From that book (emphasis mine):
The society that incorporates the perspective of tragic compassion into its basic design thus begins with a general insight: people are dignified agents, but they are also, frequently, victims. Agency and victimhood are not incompatible: indeed, only the capacity for agency makes victimhood tragic. In American society today, by contrast, we often hear that we have a stark and binary choice, between regarding people as agents and regarding them as victims.
She goes on to use cash assistance as an example, which may seem unrelated in the context of all of this but is absolutely not.
“…It said that to give people various forms of social support is to treat them as victims of life’s ills,” she writes, “rather than to respect them as agents, capable of working to better their own lot.”
Basically, we can make people less likely to become the victims of tragedies by treating them as victims of a system that has only ever victimized them. They are the kind of people that These Things Happen To and we can prevent future tragedy by helping change the pattern.
I first started thinking a lot about this in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, when, watching the live, unfolding footage from a Seattle newsroom, I realized that every single trapping of December would become a devastating memory for the families of those children whose little bodies were destroyed. Carols would sound like a funeral dirge. Lights on homes would look like candles lit in prayer. When I thought about the gifts for children under the tree that wouldn’t be unwrapped because those children went to school and never came home, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could ever celebrate anything again.
The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.
Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine
Of course, in the United States, some version of this is nearing universality. The middle of April. The end of May. The middle of June. The middle of July. The beginning of September. In a nation where guns are easier to get than health care, practically every calendar day is circled in red ink with the reminder of the day that someone got the call that their loved one had been pierced by a bullet shot from a gun that had no business being sold to a civilian.
I do think it’s worth acknowledging, though, that if this is the time of year when Your Worst Thing happened, there are added layers. Something about the tradition around unpacking a box of sentimental objects once a year has a real tendency to remind you of all the things that did, in fact, happen to you in the previous rotation around the sun.
You unpack the stocking for the dog you said goodbye to in the spring. You unfold the little ornament you made for your first child who didn’t make it past the second trimester. Who makes latkes when mom’s gone? Who puts up the lights when dad’s not around? How do you celebrate for children whose parents have both been lost to opioids or traffic violence? How do you find joy with parents whose children have been gunned down in a grocery store or school or church or movie theater or mall or, or, or?
You’re confronted with all of the past memories that are now a little bitter and the future memories you thought were waiting for you in some amount of time and then…they aren’t.
In the wake of the 2016 election and a time that felt so abysmally without answers, I found writings that would help me sort out the feelings of rage, disappointment, helplessness, betrayal, and abject fear. One text that I found which rose to the challenge was Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which I mentioned in my last little note. But it’s applicable here, too! Because I think this definition is critical as we reject the notion that These Things Don’t Happen to People Like Us — by acknowledging that they might, that they could, that they DO, we are, in fact, growing our own ability to empathize and help prevent the tragedies of others.
It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
Imagine if you thought terrible things could befall you. Imagine if just because your grandparents got to grow old in a nice senior living home, other people’s couldn’t because it’s extremely expensive and inaccessible in this country? Imagine if instead of thinking about “veterans” as some class of conservative old guys who show up in the occasional parade and wave, you pictured my late grandfather, lungs ravaged, who just wanted decent healthcare and to be able to live in an affordable assisted living home (lol no such thing) with some peers who would play cards with him?
Imagine if, instead of prioritizing your desire for an excessively huge truck, an automatic weapon, or super-low taxes, you pictured that empty chair at the table? Or the presents you wrapped for your kid never being opened because your kid didn’t come home that day?
Greed isn’t hope or even optimism. And it’s greed and entitlement that allows people to think that the bad things can’t happen to them. We are in need of a flood of genuine, hopeful humility in the face of the things we’ve created and their repercussions.
There’s a kind of hope in embracing holidays, whether religious or secular or because you like candy and lights and giving or receiving gifts. In deciding what next year you’ll do the same. In firmly believing that there will be a next year to do the same with, and that all the same people will be there, gathered around, to give and receive. And in that way, I think creating room for both grief and hope and traditions (new and old) and plans is a really brave thing to do. But I think we have to do it humbly, knowing that there’s nothing standing between us and the kind of American tragedy that has become American reality.
I rarely ask for gifts around the holidays but one that I’d put out there is this: I want us all to consider that those kinds of things do happen to people like us, because “people like us” just means people, and “those kinds of things” are, more often than not, things that a person or people set in motion.
Here are two poems to leave you with:
Emily Dickinson’s 372 is the source of the title of this letter
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
And one that always reminded me of my grandfather:
[Buffalo Bill ‘s] by ee cummings
Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death