Every Life Is a World: Sarah Jaffe on the Power of Collective Grief

Workday Magazine: This book is largely about the failure to collectively acknowledge the losses we face. But there are so many stories of people in the book who are acknowledging their losses as well as collective loss. I imagine this book is going to open people up to talking about it more and more.

Jaffe: So many people have a story that we’re not sharing and we’re not talking about publicly, not even with close friends. We do things alone, and I am super guilty of that. I’ve been trying very unevenly to get better at talking about things. It’s really hard to insist on the space to talk about it when it can often really seem like nobody wants to talk about it when the world says “go back to work, go back to normal, everything’s fine.” I tell a bunch of stories in the covid chapter, but you know, particularly these two women who lost their fathers. Cristina lost her father in that first awful wave in Italy. Kristin lost her father when politicians said, “everything’s fine, open up.” It was a political fight, right? He did not want to listen to her. It reminded me so much of my relationship with my own father. Both of them got really involved with political organizing in different ways.