This Did Not Have to Happen
(and this is where I am placing my attention today)
Her name was Renee Nicole Good.
She was a prize-winning poet.
A legal observer.
A woman who spent her life taking care of other people.
Yesterday, she was killed while doing exactly that.
She was not armed.
She was not threatening anyone.
She was not looking for a fight.
She was there to witness. To observe. To make sure that what was happening was seen and recorded and not erased. She was doing the quiet work that keeps the rest of us honest. The kind of work that rarely gets thanked and too often gets punished.
This did not have to happen.
I can’t stop thinking about how familiar she feels to me. A good life, but a hard one. A person who stayed tender in a world that rewards armor. Someone who showed up, again and again, even when it cost her something. Especially when it cost her something.
We are living in a time when violence feels ambient. Like weather. Like background noise. It seeps into places that are supposed to be safe. Churches. Schools. Sidewalks. Courtrooms. Places of worship. Places of care.
And our nervous systems are wrecked by it.
If you feel jumpy, exhausted, angry, numb, or scared, you are not broken. You are responding appropriately to a world that keeps asking us to metabolize the unbearable and then move on as if nothing happened.
What makes this loss so heavy is not just that Renee is gone. It’s that we’ve been taught to accept this as normal. To respond with sorrow but not with change. To call it a tragedy instead of naming it for what it is: the foreseeable result of choices we keep making.
This is not about politics.
It’s about how we value human life.
It’s about whether we are willing to protect the people who show up with notebooks instead of weapons. Whether we believe that witnessing, caregiving, and accountability deserve safety. Whether we are brave enough to say, out loud, that this way of living is not okay.
Renee was not reckless.
She was not naïve.
She was not trying to be a symbol.
She was doing her job.
She was doing her calling.
And she should be alive today.
So here is my very human, very non-partisan ask:
Slow down.
Pay attention.
Refuse to normalize what is breaking us.
Talk to your people.
Check on your neighbors.
Support the caregivers, the observers, the poets, the ones who show up with open hands instead of clenched fists. Choose de-escalation when you can. Choose care when it’s available. Choose to notice.
This is where my Love Is Still Beating practice comes in.
Every day, I’m committing to naming ten real, verifiable good things that happened in the last 24 hours. Not to deny the grief. Not to look away from the fire. But to remember that love is still moving through us, even now. Especially now.
Today, one of those ten is this:
People like Renee exist.
And they matter.
Say her name.
Honor her life by refusing to accept her death as inevitable.
Let your heart stay open, even when it hurts.
This did not have to happen.
And we are allowed to demand a world where it doesn’t keep happening.
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Here’s what you can do, today:
Pause before you scroll.
Check on someone you love.
Offer steadiness instead of outrage.
Support people who choose care over force.
Pay attention to what keeps your heart open.
This is how we push back against a culture of violence.
One regulated nervous system at a time.
NAKEDJEN 