I start the morning on the couch with the only light coming from the golden strings of twinkle on the Christmas tree, left up later than usual and also soon to come down, so I linger and savor the moment, still and quiet but lit up. It’s one of the things that gets me through this, the darkest season of the year — lights on the Christmas tree, battery-operated candles on the shelves and along the floor, a tall skinny LED light in the corner that can be set to multiple colors and patterns, the twinkle lights strung around the window, the light on my nightstand shaped like a tiny moon, our “alarm” clock set to slowly get brighter over time to mimic an actual sunrise hours before the real one appears, my light therapy lamp that imitates real sunlight, the candle on my meditation shrine.

I arrive at this day at the end of a week that held so many dark, sad things – Eric’s mom’s birthday, the first one without her here with us; the anniversary of January 6th, a day to mourn or to celebrate depending on your perspective; and on January 7th, a woman peacefully protesting at an ICE raid was murdered by one of their officers.

The good they murdered was a writer and a poet, a wife and a mom. She was 37, not so much my lucky number but the number that reminds me of impermanence, of love and loss, a call to keep going, to not give up, the age Kelly was when she died. Renee’s wife was there with her but not in the car. She’d gotten out and was standing next to the passenger side, recording and heckling the agents, challenging them to take off their masks and telling one to “get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Their dog, who looks exactly like my Sam, was riding with them that day and in the backseat when Renee was shot.

The last thing Renee said to an officer, before he reached in and tried to open the door demanding she “get the fuck out of the car,” before she cranked the wheel to leave was “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” It would be the last thing she’d ever say. An ICE officer stepped out from in front of the vehicle and around to directly in front of her and shot her point blank in the face and then two more times in the head. As the car rolled away with her dying at the wheel, her wife screaming and her big black dog in the backseat, one of the officers, maybe even the shooter, muttered “fucking bitch.”

Renee Good and her wife were there to disrupt, to protest, to be an obstacle to injustice — the very things U.S. citizens are called to do as a matter of pride, are promised by democracy itself we are free to do, seeing as we are united in the “land of the free, home of the brave.” Late U.S. Representative and civil rights icon John Lewis urged us to “make good trouble” in this way, encouraging us to take action and speak out against injustice, to challenge systems that are neither fair nor just. While John Lewis insisted this effort happen through nonviolent means, he himself was brutally beaten by state troopers as he lead the first march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday” in 1965. Renee and Rebecca Good were there in Minneapolis on January 7th as citizens, as neighbors, as good humans to “make good trouble” and one of them was murdered for it — a death sanctioned and supported by our government, clearly no longer a system “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

In a statement released later, Rebecca Good described her wife’s belief in the essential truth that “we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” I cannot tell you at this moment exactly how the light comes, but it does, even here, even now. Maybe one way is to do what Rebecca Good suggests, to “honor her [Renee’s] memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”

Rest in peace, Renee. May your willingness to show up with an open heart, along with your heartbreaking loss, open the door a little wider to the light. May we open and open more and open still and sustain the light that guides those who are lost back home, back home safe to the people they love. Stay tender, kind and gentle reader. Keep your heart open. And please, don’t give up.