When the Order Breaks

On loss, grief, and staying present when the world you knew stops making sense

There’s a story I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

It was early morning — pre-dawn, actually — somewhere in Colorado. I was on a fundraising trip with my boss, Barry Lynn, and we had a problem: leftover event materials, no way to get them home, and a flight to catch. Someone suggested a small suitcase. I spotted a 24-hour Walmart. I told Barry I could go in, get a suitcase, and be back at the car in under six minutes.

I did it.

That’s it. That’s the whole story. A small, solvable problem met with a proportionate solution. No drama. No bureaucratic maze. No sense that the act of acquiring a suitcase might somehow fail because the underlying structure of the world had stopped cooperating.

I didn’t know, in that parking lot, that I was living inside a kind of order. I just thought I was buying a suitcase.

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I interviewed Barry last August for the Goddess in Training podcast. He’s 78 now, retired, still everywhere — concerts, speeches, essays, grandchildren. He spent decades as the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and before that at the ACLU, and before that fighting for amnesty for Vietnam War resisters. He is one of the most scrupulously decent people I have ever met, and I worked for him for over a decade, so I have evidence.

In our conversation, he told a story about the very first days of the Carter pardon for war resisters. A young man tried to cross the Canadian border to attend his grandmother’s funeral. He’d been pardoned — but for the wrong charge. He was stopped. It was a Saturday. Barry picked up the phone and called the White House. He reached the President’s counsel, a man named Bob Lipschutz, directly. Told him what was happening. Bob said: I’ll take care of it. By Sunday morning, Bob was on Face the Nation, referencing the problem — and its resolution — in passing.

Barry told this story not to brag, but almost wistfully. As an example of what it once meant to have power and choose to use it. “If you have power and you want to exercise it,” he said, “you fix things.”

When I asked him who there is to call in this administration, he said: “Nobody. There’s nobody.”

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I’ve been sitting with that word ever since. Nobody.

Not the wrong people or people we disagree with — but nobody. The absence of a relational architecture entirely. The dissolution of the understood agreements, spoken and unspoken, about how problems were supposed to get solved.

This is what I recognize from my work as a Transition Doula: the hardest losses to name are often the invisible ones. Not the thing that fell, but the sense of order that made the falling unthinkable.

It’s a specific kind of loss, and it’s easy to misname. We call it anxiety, or outrage, or exhaustion. But underneath a lot of what people are carrying right now is something quieter and more disorienting: grief for a world that had internal logic. Where problems had proportionate solutions. Where you could walk into a Walmart at 5am and be reasonably certain that the suitcase, the flight, and the colleague waiting in the car would all be exactly where you left them.

We didn’t know we were living inside that. We just thought we were living.

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Barry and I talked about a song we both love — Mary Gauthier’s Mercy Now. I first heard it at a concert we organized, years ago, in Los Angeles. Sarah Silverman was there. A roomful of people who cared about the same things, gathered around the same music, in a world that still felt — and I can’t fully explain this — held.

Barry said of the song: “We all need mercy now. The churches need it. The politicians need it. Your neighbor needs it.”

What strikes me now is that mercy requires a receiver. And receiving requires a particular kind of openness — a willingness to be seen in your need. That’s harder when the scaffolding is gone. When the structures that used to organize collective need have either calcified or collapsed.

When there’s nobody on the other end of the line.

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Here’s what I know from sitting with people in transition:

The most destabilizing part of any threshold isn’t the event itself. It’s the loss of the story you were using to make sense of your life.

We build these narratives without realizing it. This is how things work. This is who can be trusted. This is what’s possible. And when those narratives break — whether from a diagnosis, a divorce, a death, or a world that has stopped behaving like itself — the nervous system doesn’t just register loss. It registers groundlessness.

It’s not that something bad happened. It's that the sense of manageability itself has broken down.

And grief without language becomes panic. Or numbness. Or the paralysis of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what, if anything, you can do.

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Barry, for his part, hasn’t become cynical. That was what undid me, honestly. After everything — after the courts, after the silence of religious communities, after watching the relational infrastructure of civic life erode in real time — he still believes in the necessity of decency. Of finding the one thing you agree on. Of having people to dinner even when they had a Trump sign in the yard.

He said: “You cannot go through life hating people. You have to cut them a break.”

This is not naivety. This is discipline. The hard-won kind, that knows exactly what it’s up against.

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So where does that leave the rest of us?

I think we are in a collective grief that we don’t yet have adequate language for. We’re not just grieving a policy or a politician. We’re grieving a structure of meaning — a world that organized itself in ways that, however imperfectly, suggested that repair was possible. That someone would pick up the phone. That the problem was proportionate to the solution. That you could get back to the car in six minutes.

My work as a Transition Doula isn’t about telling people what to do next. It’s about helping people stay present long enough to hear themselves think. To grieve what is genuinely gone. To locate the thread of their own agency in the middle of enormous disorientation.

Right now, that work feels less like a professional offering and more like a calling.

Because we need people who can hold the grief of this moment without either collapsing into it or rushing past it. Who can say: yes, something real has broken. Yes, that deserves mourning. And also — you are still here. Your love is still here. Your discernment is still here. The question of what is yours to tend is still worth asking.

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Barry ended our conversation by saying he wants to be remembered as someone who was scrupulously honest and who cared about people he’d never met.

He is all of those things. Just honest. And caring. Across the distance of ideology, of decades, of difference.

Maybe that’s the order we rebuild when the old one breaks.

Not top-down. Not institutional. But person to person, conversation by conversation — the slow and necessary accumulation of genuine contact.

It won’t be enough. But it’s where we start.

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If you’re sitting inside the grief of this moment — if you’re finding it hard to locate yourself in a world that feels unrecognizable — that’s what I’m here for. My Transition Doula work holds exactly this space: the threshold between the world that was and the one still becoming. You can find ways to work with me at www.goddessintraining.online.

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