Even more to lose

The longer the life, the more we have to lose.

Everything feels a bit heavy now. The seasons are shifting. The ground we walk on seems to be shifting. The things we hold dear have already shifted. The things we have been fortunate enough to take for granted seem gone.

Today my husband and I showed up at the town where we live in the countryside to receive the sad news that our neighbor has died. He was a dear man, a big man, a funny man. He had just turned 80. He sat like a sentry at the fork in our little road, on a green plastic garden chair under a tree in his garden, watching people come and go. If he didn't know who you were, then you had no business being here. He was kind, too. Offered apples from his trees to the people who walked by. Loved dogs. Appreciated nature. And he knew everything about our little road: the people, their history, and about the animals and habitat that surround us.

I don't know how his widow will cope.

His loss coincides with two significant deaths in the same week, both emerging from my home state of Utah. The first death was that of Charlie Kirk, who was killed by a single bullet to his neck at an event in Orem, Utah. That his killer was from Utah, and from a white, conservative, Mormon background, was no surprise to me. Sad, but not surprising. The young man who fired that gun could have been any of the number of young men who I grew up with.

The second death, a mere few miles away, was Robert Redford, whose death was announced on Tuesday last week. To grow up in Utah was to know that a star of Redford's magnitude was somewhere in our midst. He had chosen us, had chosen that singular place on earth as the site to create his home, to exert his remarkable influence, and to contribute to the social fabric and history of our state. Even for those of us who never met him, or even glimpsed him (I did once, in a car), we nonetheless knew he was there. This knowing added an enhanced vision of who we were and what we had to offer.

How uncanny that these two deaths, both from Utah, represent such different truths and meanings. Both men are equally mourned, but in different measures by disparate populations.

I struggle to find the right words to explain this confounding significance. These two deaths, in this short span of time, encapsulate precisely the pain and reckoning that characterized the reality of my growing up in Utah, of reaching adulthood in Utah, and ultimately trying to escape it. There were two extreme and omnipresent halves: those who were devout Mormons, and those who were not There were the salty old cowboys, and there were the holy Church people. There were the rigid structures of the Church in agricultural Mormon towns, and there were liberal nature lovers who idolized Utah's mountains and red rock and rugged terrain. All of these people loved Utah in their own way, but their way of loving it were very different. Living in Utah meant constantly traversing between opposing sides, navigating between people who blamed and demonized each other, who made you feel forced to choose between their extreme versions of good and evil, to believe that you had to hate somebody.

It was exhausting. It is no understatement that this incessant tension was a major contributing factor to my decision to move away, first within the USA and then to Finland. I could not reconcile the two extreme sides within my own existence, and I didn't want to be caught in the middle, one side spewing hate in one ear while the other side did the same in the other ear. So I left. I can promise that this was no small feat, and I have spent a lifetime dealing with the grief, loss and compromise that are consequences of my choice.

You will notice that I wrote in a previous paragraph"trying to escape," because of course the reality is that I didn't succeed. Instead, the extremism followed. It has taken over our existence in the USA and indeed much of the world. I find myself thinking back on those formative days of my childhood, sitting in a church pew at the Mormon chapel, being indoctrinated about the end of days and the fight between good and evil. But now everything is mixed up and the moral and ethical compass spins recklessly. It's frightening that people don't seem to know anymore the relationship between morality and goodness and what is right.

I wish there were a lesson in there somewhere, some kernal of truth for me to extract and lift out as a thesis, even for myself. I wish there were an "I told you so," or "We have to start ..." but there is not. Rather, what it feels like is that these two deaths, coincidentally from my home state of Utah during the same week, are an emblem rather than a lesson. They are an exhibition of who we are right now. We are two sides, cleaved. No one is right, and everyone suffers. And like I was all those years ago when I left Utah, I am exhausted. We are all exhausted. Now we all know what it feels like to be exhausted from being forced to choose sides.

Perhaps this backdrop all helps to explain that, when I heard about the death of our neighbor, my grief was far greater than it should have been. I didn't know him very well; we had no more than a few interactions over the last few years in my limited capacity to speak and understand Swedish. The grief and anger I experienced, am still experiencing, was a reaction to something even bigger than the loss of this one man. He represented something I miss, something we all miss: a kind, even, solid and predictable person, a person who offered the same generosity to everyone around. We have forgotten how to care for each other.