OUT OF LEFT FIELD: Now's a time to come together
By Kyra Hoggan
There was a movie that came out in 1993 called Six Degrees of Separation. (It later spawned a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon).
The basic premise was, you’re never more than six relationships away from any other human being.
Let’s use the Kevin Bacon example. The game required that you go through your relationships and find the six-or-less steps that lead you to him – eg: I dated that guy in high school. That guy’s mom lived in LA in ’67, and dated that OTHER guy, whose dad was the cousin of a woman who was once married to the guy who is now Kevin Bacon’s director (I TOTALLY made that up, so don’t bother trying to track it to its source). But you get the idea. Six degrees of separation.
In New York (where the movie was set) this made sense.
Here in the Koots, you’re lucky if it’s half-a-degree of separation. In my experience, it’s usually less than even that.
When I used to report on tragedies in the Calgary area, they made me sad, to be sure.
But it’s different here.
When tragedy strikes here, if you didn’t personally know the individual(s) involved, then you most certainly personally know someone who did. More likely, you know dozens, if not hundreds, of people who are struggling with grief.
Small town curse. Just as your children are protected by the fact everyone knows everyone, just as you are validated by being recognized everywhere you go – there is no big-city anonymity to protect you from the pain of your community’s heartbreaking loss.
I didn’t know how to cope with that when I first came here – everything seemed so raw, in the face of terrible events.
Of course, there were some hard-and-fast journalistic rules for me to cling to: You never, ever say ‘was lost’ or ‘passed away’, you don’t ever, ever treat readers like they’re stupid; there is no place for euphemisms in journalism. It’s ‘died’ or ‘was killed by’, exactly because you need your readers to trust you to give them the straight, hard facts, not some soft-soaped version of same, in a crisis situation more than any other.
That all being neither here nor there, it’s just about stating the facts.
Coping with the facts is another matter entirely.
When I discover I don’t know how to deal with something, I start watching the people who do, and try to learn from them (I suspect that watching comes off as very creepy to those who don’t know what I’m thinking), and if I’ve observed or learned anything over the past decade, it’s that the best way to cope with community pain is not to hide from it or ignore it, but rather to open your heart.
The media will tell you if something awful happened in this, your little corner of the world.
If that happens, be more patient in the fast-food drive-thru. If someone at work is short with you, be gentle with them, they might be grieving very profoundly. If someone calls in sick or misses school, make some allowances for a community in mourning. Don’t react to anything on social media with anything but gentle caring. If you find yourself getting impatient or angry – sit down and shut up. Go watch a comedy show, go putter in your garden, take your motorcycle for a spin. Do that thing that centres you, because you are NOT in the big city, and your community needs you to be strong when others among you feel broken.
(And yes, I absolutely learned this the hard way, by getting it wrong).
Most of all – and this is HUGE – what makes our community work so well is that, when things go sideways, we’re always there for each other. The beautiful part about zero degrees of separation, despite the lack of privacy, is that you never have to be alone in tragedy.
If you’re not in a position to help out, then by all means, take a pass and just be kind and patient.
But if you do have a bit to offer, give a little … and know others will for you, too, when it’s your turn (and we ALL get a turn, as much as we hate to think it might be so).
So, on that note, there is a way to pitch in, in this latest community heartbreak. Be kind and gentle to everyone around you. And if you have it to give, help out at https://www.gofundme.com/zzuj3w4c
I, personally, offer my deepest condolences to Dan Davidoff and his family and friends.
