A relative posted a video of Pastor Greg Locke on his Facebook page.

Locke is onstage, pacing and raging, jabbing a finger toward the camera as though the lens itself were possessed. The devil, the witches, Democrats, and the media — everyone gets named. The gullible get a savior. Spit flies. The congregation erupts in cheers.

I love this relative. He’s a sweet, sweet man. I know who Greg Locke is. I know the conspiracies, the performances dressed up like sermons, and the marriage of grievance and God.

At some point, I asked my relative about it.

He said Locke speaks boldly for the Holy Spirit.

Then another relative posted a tribute to Donald Trump on social media. I should have kept scrolling. Instead, I commented.

I told her she knew better. I wasn’t polite about it. I reminded her that she’d raised kind, thoughtful children. That was the woman I’d always known. I wasn’t asking her to abandon her politics. I was asking if the decency she’d once insisted on for them still applied.

Even as I wrote it, I realized I wasn’t really trying to persuade her. I was looking for the person who had raised such kind, thoughtful children.

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she offered a string of what-abouts ending with, “[Trump’s] a good man and a great American leader!” I may have used an expletive in response. She unfriended me.

I wasn’t surprised by being unfriended. I was surprised by what had gone unanswered.

When I could see every post, every meme, and every political declaration, those became the relationship.

I used to know what she thought about her garden and her grandkids. Now I know what she thinks about Haitians in Ohio.

Since she unfriended me, I no longer know what she posts. Instead, I remember her wedding. A family vacation. The ordinary life we had before Trump.

I kept replaying the exchange. Getting unfriended should have settled it, but I kept thinking about how long it’d been since I’d seen her. We were both older now. I wondered if I’d regret letting politics become the last thing we ever said to each other.

Facebook wasn’t preserving the relationship. It was replacing it, a little at a time.

Grief and relief turned out to be difficult to separate. I was grieving who she’d been to me before any of this, and I was relieved I no longer had to brace for what she might say next.

Too many of us are living this. It starts quietly: a meme, a forwarded clip, a context-free headline, an election rumor, a warning about immigrants.

There is no word for this kind of loss. No one has died. The holidays still happen and Thanksgiving is still Thanksgiving. If you’ve lived through it, you know the choreography. You offer your hand where you once would have hugged them. You politely pass the rolls.

The grief is oddly private. There is no funeral, no line of mourners, no neighbors arriving with casseroles. It never quite goes away. It taps you on the shoulder.

One morning at Dunkin’, I run into someone I knew years ago. There is no memory-jogging, no catching up. Within minutes, he explains with complete confidence that the 2020 election was stolen, that immigrants are destroying the country, and that federal agencies deserved what they got. He isn’t trying to persuade me. He’s telling me he’s arrived.

Later that week, I’m at a family dinner. Conversation drifts through safe territory: the Baltimore Symphony, where I volunteer; a trip to Italy; the eternal argument over who makes the best carbonara.

Someone mentions the Kennedy Center, and the table goes quiet.

Someone reaches for the wine. Someone else gets up.

Then it’s coats and leftovers. Someone insists we take more food home than we’ll ever eat. I wonder whether the one across from me still wants a hug after what I wrote last week. She’s probably wondering the same thing about me.

We hug anyway.

The drive home answers nothing. I turn the radio off and leave it off. Somewhere along the way, I wonder what this has done to all of us. We argue. We stop speaking. We’re all pretty sure we’re right, and less sure what to do with one another.

The distance grows anyway, quietly, the way a crack finds its way across a windshield. One morning you just see it.

The author at home.

Courtesy of James Cecil

I know someone who makes the best crab cakes in Maryland, which is a real claim. She also believes the election was stolen, which is not. I fix her screen door anyway.

Another person I know posts a doctored image of Michelle Obama as a monkey. He would never tolerate that kind of cruelty from his own children, but somehow he finds it acceptable for himself.

He also sees nothing strange about a president selling Bibles.

I eventually choose to unfollow him.

It’s not defiance. It’s an admission that I no longer know what to say to him.

Friends have disappeared too. Some quietly. Others after arguments neither of us could have imagined having 20 years ago. What I miss isn’t only the friendship. It’s how easily we once knew one another.

There are days when anger feels simpler. It offers clarity. It promises clean endings. Grief refuses them.

We still pass the rolls.

Nothing visible has changed. Everything that matters has.

I have spent years wondering what MAGA has done to people I love. I have watched certainty harden them. I have watched people I know to be kind excuse cruelty and repeat things that aren’t true. Those things matter. An election isn’t a matter of opinion. What someone says about immigrants isn’t harmless. What they excuse isn’t nothing.

But I haven’t stayed out of it, either. I see their politics before I see them. Maybe they look across the same table and wonder what happened to me. I can’t know.

Before we chose sides, there was a life. Holidays. Vacations. Phone calls. The holidays and vacations are still real. So is the distance. Neither one erases the other. That doesn’t make the facts negotiable. It doesn’t make cruelty less cruel or a lie less of a lie.

I’ve been asking what happened to the people I love as though they disappeared somewhere. They didn’t. They’re still here. So am I.

I don’t know where any of this goes — not just with them, but with all of us. We were raised to know better. Then we watched one man break the rules, and only some of us cared.

Some of the people I care about have placed their trust in politicians who seem to have mistaken loyalty to one man for the duty they were elected to perform.

I used to believe what happened online stayed online — that a post wasn’t a person. I don’t believe that anymore. I’ve watched it become the relationship. I’ve watched it replace the person I knew with the loudest version of them.

What happened to the people I love? Can I get them back, and if not, is staying and watching who they’ve become better than walking away?

We have learned things about one another that we cannot unlearn.

I imagine families everywhere are asking the same thing: stay or go? I don’t know what it costs a country if enough of us walk away from one another. I don’t know what it costs if we all stay and keep pretending it’s fine.

Maybe some of these relationships won’t survive. I don’t know how to reach them anymore.

I keep trying.

James Cecil is a Baltimore writer who came to the craft late, unless you count decades of opinions. His writing credentials include two winning entries in The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, which he intends to keep mentioning until something better happens. He volunteers at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, loves Strauss tone poems, and has been accused of cheating at Scrabble, but his proudest accomplishment is his three daughters.