Day 32 of the Apocalypse, Ground Zero, Gerton, NC pop. 231

About a week after the hurricane I started to get weird prepper ads showing up in my Facebook feed occasionally. Now they are constant.

Every fourth post is an ad for a portable shower, toilet, or generator. There are ads for water filtration systems, walkie-talkies, life-saving medicines, and backpacks full of food and supplies to last anywhere from a week to a month.

Then there are more morbid ads, for gas masks, pepper spray projectile guns, and disaster survival books.

Every four posts I am reminded how unprepared we were for the hurricane.

Every four posts I am given curated images of what it looks like to be prepared.

We were not prepared.

Even with everything we know now, we could never be fully prepared for an event such as this, because you cannot equip your heart for mass destruction and devastation. How do you plan for this level of grief?

As my neighbor Laura said to me last night, grief is the most universal human emotion. The more you grieve, the more you give witness to what you have lost.

Where are the ads for healing your heart?

Where is the guidebook for longing for a community that will never exist again?

What ad will give me the tool to process the fact that recovery of bodies still continues just down the road from us, a month after the hurricane?

Those are the ads I want to see.

I’ve attached some images of these ads that are infiltrating my feed, so you can understand how overwhelming it is to constantly be reminded how we weren’t prepared. And the lengths we would have needed to go to in order to plan for a 30,000-year geological event.