Mary Wilke, Convener of Kent Street Coalition’s Education Working Group, is providing this Week in Perspective.

As we experience anguish and rage in the face of ongoing attacks against decency, humanity and democracy, our daily personal lives continue to unfold. And the personal sorrows that inevitably come our way find us with less resilience, because we’re already so deep in despair.

Around the time of Trump’s inauguration, I learned that my dear friend Karl had cancer that had spread to his bones. In May he entered the hospice phase of dying. My husband and I spent many hours with him this summer, talking, reminiscing, living our lives together for a few last precious months.

During that time, the bad news on the national front continued its relentless pace. Congress passed the big, ugly bill; Trump deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles; the Supreme Court shocked us again and again with shadow docket proclamations. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was finally brought back to the US from the brutal gulag in El Salvador, only to face vindictive efforts by Trump’s lackeys to send him to some other country’s hellhole.

How do we live our own personal lives, how do we attend to our families and friends in their hours of need and properly grieve for them, yet still find the strength and will to resist this ugly takeover of our flawed but beloved democracy?This summer I tried to stay active in resistance efforts, but really didn’t accomplish much. Reading the news gave me ideas every day for LTEs, but I could never find the focus to complete them. I attended political meetings, but rarely spoke. I found a few easy tasks to do, but left many others undone.

At times I felt guilty about this. But I tried to take to heart the advice my son-in-law once gave me after I’d suffered a serious medical incident: “When you take care of yourself, you’re taking care of all of us.”

Sometimes we just need to stop. And then come back when we can.

These days, while I mourn Karl’s death, hope feels elusive, but it’s not entirely gone. One way I find inspiration is to stop focusing only on defense and instead imagine what we might build together when we get to the other side of this nightmare. I’ve realized that sometimes I’m so involved in pushing back against rhetorical attacks on our schools – “No! Our teachers are NOT Marxist indoctrinators!” – that I forget to envision the public school system of my dreams. At the national level, let’s not get so deep in defense and despair that the most we hope for is to someday patch together bits and pieces of what we’ve lost. Let’s imagine, instead, what a “more perfect union” could look like, and find inspiration there.

At Karl’s memorial service, his son and daughter asked me to read a piece called “Benedicto,” by Edward Abbey. It’s fitting for Karl, a hiker and adventurer, but also, I think, for all of us. It begins: “May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”

Abbey describes difficult, sometimes frightening paths, ones that run through swamps and chasms and lightning storms. Sound familiar? But in the end, he says, they will lead to a place:

where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams
waits for you —
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

View the full Happenings email for this week here.