In my dreams, there is room for all our grief. There is time for all our grief.

When Irish families said goodbye to those fleeing the Hunger, they would host wakes with expectations that their large, extended families would never be seen again. 

In the late 1840s, my ancestors were among those fleeing Donegal, Ireland to escape an empire-induced potato famine that took place under English rule. I wonder what it was like for my Irish Catholic ancestors to say goodbye to their families forever. I hope they find solace knowing my Irish-American family is still deep in the way of knowing our second, third, and fourth cousins. 

As someone five generations removed from the ancestors forced to flee, I can trace the reverberations of trauma throughout my family. In three generations preceding mine, Irish men in my family have died before they reached the age of 40. Alcoholism, violence, shame, and mental health challenges run strong in Irish-American families. A first-generation Irish-American friend told me recently, “Irish men die young, and the women live forever.” We laughed sarcastically, but there’s pain broiling under the surface. 

We feel into our grief, sleep in it, rise in it.

Last Winter, my cousin C went missing in Manhattan. For two months, my family, friends, and treasured strangers gathered to search the strip of land where he was last seen. We lived everyday in a terrified limbo of hope and desperation. As we hung flyers in subway stations, posted on social media, and pleaded for help finding C, I witnessed with continued horror the news of thousands of worlds and lives collapsing in Palestine. I posted Instagram stories asking for support finding C, and clicked into GoFundMe links to send money for the survival and fleeing of Palestinian families in Gaza. I imagined searching for C in a city that was also being bombed, without hospitals, without regular meals, while also grieving other loved ones. I carried a stone in my chest.

In the Spring, C’s body was found. The dam of fear that had been building all Winter broke open with our answered question. I felt a deluge of grief. C died at 26 years old, marking the fourth generation of a young man to die in my Irish lineage. At the wake, C’s twin, Q, bravely named the carceral and mental health systems that failed C throughout his life.

When I looked at my family gathered around me honoring C’s life, I felt so proud to be of them. Proud of our tight hugs, our loving and meandering toasts, open tears, music-making, and courage to name hard truths even when there might be blowback. Proud of our Irishness. At the time, I was also witnessing steadfast and sweeping Irish solidarity with Palestine. I wondered what stories of colonization/ resistance and cultural loss/ preservation live in my family history, and what they could teach me about how to feel through my grief - for C, for Gaza, for a world that lets genocide happen.

We gather what we need and share it amongst ourselves. We hold one another. 

Like me, many of us white Americans come from ancestors who fled a place that was their home for generations before. They fled to escape persecution, genocide, and poverty. They fled for dreams of raising a family in a place where they might survive, or even thrive. In a Somatic Abolitionism workshop I attended, Resmaa Menekem said to those of us who live in white bodies: “You never dealt with the fleeing.” 

In my family, there is a severed memory of the “before.” I grew up hearing a confusing blend of wistful nostalgia for the Old Country alongside a narrative that our familial “before” in Ireland was miserable and exchanged for a better life in the U.S. The stories of all there was to be gained by coming to the States were so dominant, I didn’t grow up hearing about what was left behind. But my family's losses were great. 

Upon their arrival to New York, my Irish ancestors were met with discrimination and poverty. Like many immigrants who became white, they broke ties to their culture – their names, food, language, traditional clothing, music, relationships with family in their home countries, connections to land, and more. Whether their choices were conscious or not, all of these cultural sacrifices were made in exchange for the privileges afforded by assimilation into whiteness. By giving up parts of their Irishness, they received “safety” at the top of a racial hierarchy that was built on the enslavement of Africans and genocide of Native peoples. This was not passive - European immigrants who became white Americans enforce(d) this hierarchy through violence, instilling our power through the law. 

For Irish New Yorkers, one path to whiteness was policing. My grandparents’ ascent into the middle class and eventual land ownership was spurred by my grandfather’s job in the (infamously Irish-American!) NYPD. Police dehumanize those they are policing to enact the racist violence entrenched in their role. The disembodiment my grandfather experienced can be passed down, often expressed as alcoholism, violence, shame, and mental health challenges. 

Generations of white people have learned to override and numb the horror that threatens to rise in our bodies as we witness violence enacted by one another against people of color. It immobilizes us when we are confronted with moments that should activate us. It tricks us into believing our safety depends on someone’s suffering. It allows is to justify genocide. 

The grief opens a door, and we walk through. 

How can we free our lineages from these deceptions? How can we release ourselves from numbness to make room for the deluge of grief, rage, and horror that resides inside us? How can we hold each other through it? 

I start by slowing down to feel it all. I take a breath and notice the sensations rising in my body. I put my hand to my chest, where the stone lives, and feel it soften a little. I remind myself that all is not lost. 

We fall into the tastes and smells of remembrance. We tell all the stories. We get everyone’s name right. We sob. We rest. We play. 

As long as there has been empire and occupation, there have been people defying it. Despite 800 years of colonization in Ireland that threatened the loss of natural Atlantic rainforest ecosystems, trees are being replanted, forests restored. Irish children are growing up learning the language of those who knew the land for centuries before them. In addition to Irish-American histories of assimilation and racism, we have also built radical alliances with Black and brown people. Irish people on both sides of the sea are abolitionists, we participate in uprisings, and we organize for the end of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Familiarizing myself with these acts of defiance opens a portal for me to see resistance to racism and colonization as part of my Irish inheritance, too.

We gather seashells at the shores of death, and share them with loved ones to remember and hold onto. We uncover all the rubble. We find all the missing. 

I will never know the depth of the culture my ancestors sacrificed, but I get to co-create what remains. I practice cultural embodiment as a means of defying the white supremacy that deceived my ancestors into giving up their culture. I cry out for every life, library, and olive tree destroyed in Palestine. I mourn the cultural losses and trauma that generations of Palestinians will be left to reckon with. I honor every olive tree being replanted despite persistent violence, and I vow to support, in any way I can, future generations of Palestinian resistance, healing, and cultural vibrance.

My Irishness is sometimes a feeling in my gut. I’m uncovering and following it like a beloved return. Some of the Irish culture I know now looks like backyard parties with my many cousins, swimming gleefully in the coldest ocean temperatures, and remembering a lifetime by the water and in the woods with C. It looks like a deep spiritual connection to nature and dreams. It looks like story-gathering from my elder storytellers to grow our cultural memory. It looks like pausing to feel the tides of grief rising in my body. It looks like showing up in solidarity with people across the globe who are experiencing the violence of occupation and colonization. 

We raise our hands and look to the sky. We say, No more. The bombs stop. The shrapnel turns to seeds. Ancestral grief pours down, nurturing a world where Palestine is Free.