Where (and How) Do We Go with our Sorrow?

The first headline that greeted me when I opened my laptop this morning was the news that NHL star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew had been killed by a (most likely) drunk driver while riding their bikes in New Jersey. The scene is heartbreaking to contemplate. Two brothers out for a late-summer bike ride, a few days ahead of their sister’s wedding. One can imagine a joyful family reunion full of laughter and kids and grand-kids and the anticipation of all the celebrations around the weekend nuptials. All shattered by a moment of madness. A young woman, widowed, two very young children who will almost certainly never remember a thing about their father. A family, gutted. It is all so very, very sad.

Johnny Gaudreau was drafted by the Calgary Flames, the team I have cheered for since I was a kid. I remember the first time I saw him play. I thought he was too small to ever succeed at the highest level. But he not only succeeded, he thrived. His best years (at least statistically) were in southern Alberta, highlighted by the 2021-22 season when he scored 40 goals and added 75 assists. That was a fun year to watch the Flames (and that can’t be said for many years). Gaudreau was adored by the long-suffering fan base until he decided to sign with the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2022, a decision which surprised (and irritated) many. But business is business, we all got it. We all sort of understood that an American would probably eventually want to move closer to home to start a family, etc.

I’ve been sitting here this morning trying to parse the sadness we feel, the sadness we express to one another and online, the things we say, the things we don’t say, the containers we put all these things in. The news articles provide a laundry list of reactions from celebrities, from NHL teams, from other sporting organizations. “Thoughts and prayers” are everywhere and nowhere. There will be emotional video tributes at NHL hockey games this fall. Perhaps his number will be sewn on to patches for jerseys or find its way on to stickers on helmets. Sorrow will be expressed in its usual ways.

And it will also be expressed in its usual directions. There’s probably something to be said for our emotional attachment to celebrity here, of course. The deaths of the Gaudreau brothers are undeniably terrible, but so are the deaths of the countless other ordinary people who die in traffic accidents every day. Matthew Perry’s overdose death is no more or less sad (or deserving of “justice”) than the homeless addict slumped over for the last time in an alley in East Hastings Street. People are dying every day in Gaza and Ukraine and Ethiopia, people whose lives were far more miserable and unjust than that of super-rich athletes and actors. Some people get public thoughts and prayers and some—most—don’t. Thus it has ever been, I suppose.

I’m also thinking of the cultural moment in which our sorrow is expressed. Someone recently sent me an article from The New York Times on loneliness. It was like many such articles—a decent enough analysis of the myriad causes of our cultural despair combined with a woefully inadequate “solution.” I almost laughed out loud when I read the author’s conclusion which was, essentially, “things will probably just naturally get better, be patient… no, people don’t seem to have the kinds of thick community attachments that once sustained them, but we have Taylor Swift concerts and sporting events to provide us with collective moments of euphoria and we have online communities to appeal to niche groups and interests.” Um, ok, then.

Naturally, I was drawn to the part of the article that (limply) gestured toward religion. After acknowledging that religious communities once provided the kinds of thick attachments that at least seemed to help with loneliness and despair, the author says this:

I’m not suggesting that we should become more religious, but I want to just suggest to you that religious communities are a place where adults engage kids, stand for moral values, engage kids in big moral questions, where there’s a fusion of a moral life and a spiritual life… A sense that you have obligations to your ancestors and to your descendants, where there is a structure for dealing with grief and loss… I feel urgently like we have to figure out how to reproduce those aspects of religion in secular life.

I read that paragraph again after wading around in online grief about the death of Johnny Gaudreau. The thought occurred to me, “Well, maybe someone should suggest that we become more religious. Maybe we actually do need “structure for dealing with grief and loss.” Maybe we do need something like a shared moral narrative within which to locate life and death, joy and pain, wonder and rage, longing and redemption, guilt and mercy, and a hope that goes beyond even death.” Maybe these things can’t just be “reproduced” in secular life, however urgently we might feel that they should, because these things are not (and will never be) secular in nature.

I hope the Gaudreau family has something like this to sustain and surround them over the next days, months, and years. And if they don’t, I pray they find it. Sorrow this deep needs something beyond the secular to contain it, to give it a moral and existential vocabulary that does justice to the pain, and, ultimately, to heal it.

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I wrote this post listening to the new album by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. It’s called “Wild God” and is beautiful, lyrically and musically. It’s also a deeply religious album, in the very best sense of the word. I was struck by these lines in the opening song, “Song of the Lake”:

For every evil under the sun
If there be one, seek it till you find
For there’s either a remedy or there is none
And if there is none, never mind, never mind