Gathering in Grief

By Saadia Qureshi

Last week was heavy.

Hearing about the terrorist attack on the Muslim school in San Diego left me feeling deeply sad and honestly depleted. There are moments after tragedies like this where your mind spirals in a hundred directions at once.  Grief, fear, anger, exhaustion, helplessness. You replay headlines in your head. You think about children. You think about your local community. You think about how many times people have had to explain that Muslims deserve safety, dignity, and humanity too.

After it happened, I almost didn’t leave the house.

I had registered for a workshop hosted by the Peace and Justice Institute and the State Attorney’s Office through a multi-year initiative focused on hate crimes and community response systems. But after hearing the news, showing up felt emotionally impossible. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to process. I didn’t want to sit in another room trying to hold hope together while carrying the weight of another attack.

But eventually, I dragged my family to the event anyway.

Not because I felt inspired. Not because I had some deep sense of optimism. Honestly, I went because sometimes the only thing you can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.

And by the end of the evening, I was really glad I did.

The workshop focused on practical ways communities can respond to hate crimes. Not only through the legal system, but also through restorative and mediation pathways when cases don’t make it through the courts. But more than the content itself, what stayed with me was the feeling of being in a room where people understood the weight many of us were carrying.

No one tried to rush grief away. No one minimized the fear. Nobody had the perfect words, but people showed up anyway. Not performatively. Not because it was trending. But because they understood that in moments like these, presence matters.

And that reminded me of something important.

When terrible things happen, many of us get trapped in our own heads. We doomscroll. We replay worst-case scenarios. We feel emotionally paralyzed wondering what difference one person could possibly make. I think sometimes we convince ourselves that if we can’t fix the whole problem, there’s no point in doing anything at all. But healing and change rarely begin with grand gestures. Most of the time, they begin with small acts of participation.

You go to the workshop.
You check in on a neighbor.
You attend the vigil.
You call a friend.
You donate.
You learn.
You organize.
You keep showing up.

Action does not erase grief. But it interrupts hopelessness.

There is something powerful about physically placing yourself in spaces where people are trying to build understanding, trying to protect one another, trying to create systems rooted in dignity and accountability instead of fear and division. Even when the world feels unbearably heavy, those spaces remind us that hate is not the only thing being built right now.

There are also people building community.
People building trust.
People building safety.
People building healing.

And maybe that is part of the answer when tragedy leaves us emotionally stuck: don’t wait until you feel perfectly hopeful to act. Sometimes hope is something you discover after you decide to show up anyway.

One foot in front of the other.
One conversation.
One gathering.
One act of courage.
One act of care.

Right now, that feels worth holding onto.