Sarah Jaffe

It suddenly made sense when I was doing stories on factory closures.

You know, in 2018 was Trump 1.0, and I was doing a lot of stories on factories closing.

I had been in Indiana.

I had been in Ohio.

And actually, the story is in the book where I was in Ohio.

I was covering the closure of the Lordstown plant, which is kind of a famous auto plant, General Motors plant, just outside Youngstown, Ohio.

And I was sitting in the office talking to Tim O'Hara, who was at the time the vice president of the union, and Dave Green, who was the president of the union, is now the regional director for the UAW in that area.

You know, he just comes in and flops on the couch and looks over at me and goes, you know how they say there are seven stages of grieving?

Well, we can't go through them because we don't know.

We're stuck in the middle, you know?

And I was like, huh, right.

This is a grief story.

Except it's a sort of disenfranchised grief is one of the terms for things like that, right?

Where you can't really go through it because it wasn't clear what was actually going to happen to the factory.

It has closed now since some of the workers are now working for a battery plant in the area.

Some of the workers got scattered all over the country.

But at the time, they didn't know it was still early and they were still trying to fight to keep it open.

And yeah, to realize like, oh, I'm already writing grief stories.

I'm writing stories of immigration and talking to people about what they leave behind.

You know, then 2020 hits and we get COVID and then we get the George Floyd uprising and we just get this double whammy of talking about grief in public, right?