When Two Breaths Share the Same Sky: Grief, Despair, and the Strange Light of Healing
There are days when the world feels unbearably heavy.
Last week, we all learned about the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, poet, wife, and neighbor who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. She was returning from dropping her young child off at school; her life ended in seconds, and in the shocked aftermath an entire community has been grasping for meaning, for justice, for some thread of humanity in the wake of violence. Her family remembers her as someone with a “capacity for love” and “an abundant heart.” Her absence has left a void that words can barely touch.
As someone who sits in the tender spaces of hurt both in my personal world and in the lives of the clients I walk with this loss hit me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. It feels heavy, violent, and heart-breaking on behalf of strangers. And also on behalf of myself.
Many of the clients I work with are people who know pain so deeply that they walk through the world in survival mode. I have friends who, like me, recognize how fragile life can be. And then there’s the existential ache and the sense that we’re gathered at the threshold of something awful, waiting for a door to open that never does. Despair feels like standing in a hallway with too many locked doors and no light.
In those moments, it feels hopeless.
You’ve seen that look before, the kind of gaze where people turn to one another, eyes wide with confusion and shared helplessness, silently asking, “What can we do?” When the world feels chaotic, when headlines spill pain after pain, and you can’t escape the weight of it, that’s when it feels like the very breath of the world has grown heavy.
But here’s the strange, sacred part.
In the very same hours that Renee took her last breath, I was standing in the arena next to somebody who has been deeply wounded by life. Someone who trusts almost nothing and no one. Someone who is on a first name basis with fear spoken in a language most other people have not had to learn how to speak.
In that same slice of time, this person took a new breath…one they hadn’t taken in years.
Not just an ordinary breath, but a cathartic, healing release that left them tremoring, vulnerable, and open. The kind of breath that comes after pain finally finds expression. And in that very moment, they leaned into Daphne (their relationship horse), offering a pure, loving “horse hug”; a gesture of total trust. In that one act, something happened. While a life was stolen, another began to heal.
Two realities, both unmistakably true, existing on the same plane. That is duality. The despair and the hope are not opposites; they live together. Even when it feels fruitless, even when the news makes you want to retract into numbness, there are moments like this. Moments that feel like light carving its way through stone.
This is where I sometimes remind myself of Mr. Rogers’s wisdom about looking for the helpers. Not because suffering goes away, but because helping matters. Even when it feels small and even when the world seems bleak.
I’m here.
Not because I signed up for all the heaviness (I certainly didn’t learn this part of the job in grad school) but because this work chose me. Because in the trenches, with all their thick mud and tangled roots, I have witnessed real, messy, human healing. And that matters.
I am deeply affected by the terrible pain in the world, and you likely are as well.
But I am also witness to the moments where life re-awakens, breath by sacred breath. And so I look for those moments on purpose; like stars shining against the darkest sky.
And so I hold both truths:
The heartbreak of a life ended too soon.
The pure, trembling first breaths of healing in those who thought they’d never feel safe again. Both are real, both are sorrowful, both deserve honoring, all in the same breath.
I am grateful to be one of the helpers, even while I live inside the heaviness of this time. Because if healing is happening here, in quiet arenas and trembling arms, maybe there’s a reason to keep proving that love and care matter, even while the world falls apart in other places.
