People who are grieving make decisions they wouldn’t make if they weren’t riven by loss, riddled by bereavement. I know this from personal experience. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” is how I frame decisions I made in grief that had negative consequences.

We kind of know that individually, and you hear it when you’re going through grief. Don’t make any big decisions after a loss, people say. But we’re less aware of how that works culturally when an entire world, country, group, or city is stricken.

We understand that people who lost their homes in the fires in LA are suffering a loss. But it’s clear that the entire area suffered a significant trauma. Houses left standing are uninhabitable because of smoke and ash. The structure exists, from the street it might look unscathed, but it’s too polluted for habitation. And the fires are still burning as I write this.

I’m not a therapist or a grief counselor, but I’ve lived through various kinds of loss, and what I’m noticing today is the cultural impact of unmetabolized grief. Not as a scholar or practitioner of any kind, but as someone who made some regrettable decisions following a loss.

If we don’t make space for grief, individually and communally, it’s difficult to process it. And that lingering grief, metastasized, can show up in unexpected, damaging ways.

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