Death
Deferred mourning is spread out over time. It creeps up silently in moments alone. Leaning over the bathroom sink, it squeezes out lone tears. A head’s shake and two crossed arms raised up to block those feelings send the emotions back to where they hide, waiting to pop back up at the next idle moment and remind me that I have never properly grieved. But who am I to grieve when clearly I am not the saddest one? I assume that some of my thinking and feeling wires got disconnected. I never broke down, I never cursed God. I simply filed that person as “away,” another friend and family member I rarely catch up with. We will have that sync-up conversation we owe each other when I die, too.
The memory that won’t leave me is my mother — whom I’d only seen double over in any type of pain (physical or emotional) once in my childhood — nearly 6 feet tall, flopping like a terrible twos tantrum, wailing the name of my cousin. Screaming for her sister. Simul-mourning two family members: my middle aunt, the first of her six siblings to stop living, and her eldest son, a prodigal cousin who was utterly unprotected from America’s threats to poor Black boys.
I don’t talk as much about these losses to those outside of the family because I think: who am I to speak about people whose lives I was not intricately involved in until the end?
What shames me most is knowing how they loved me by virtue of being born, meanwhile I was worried about boys and friends and college admissions and homework and job applications and improv classes. When their behaviors made my elders uncomfortable, I slid into the groove of judgment, assuming the path of most compartmentalization.
I thought that one memory was dominant but another one pushes through. It’s vibrant and shameful. My grandmother (who must have helped my eldest sister bury a body because I can’t think of a time that one has found fault with the other) was being celebrated. I’m thinking it was her 70th, and I’m counting by my hair style (cornrows into a ponytail); my rounded, couth-less spectacles (baby nerd); and my pre-teen smile (oh, innocence) because the only memory I own from that night is the one I’m sharing now…
Ever since I could remember, we have been a Black-ass Midwestern family: Settling for abandoned hope after the Great Migration. Painstaking hours of family tree research that reveal too many pale ancestors for anyone’s comfort. Boarded-up public schools that we pass and recall all of the family members who attended there at one point in the canon. An imbued knowledge of how to be a neighbor in the ‘hood. Merciless teasing of the cousins (me) who were raised and educated in the suburbs. That time my cousin cautioned me to stop crying after a gun was brandished in my direction. That one funeral where we almost brawled, and I read out loud uncensored Tupac lyric’s in front of 100 people. The way everyone always seemed to be in pain in a way that pain has no special meaning.
Shaking of the head. Crossing of the arms.
So then, what do Black-ass Midwestern families do at the end of a party? Why, they Soul Train-line, forming two parallel, facing lines and encouraging everyone to dance from one end to the other until they re-join the line and groove with the others. Looking back on myself-at-that-age today, I see her as sweet and precious and so intelligent. Prior to some more recent healing, I saw her as too awkward for reconciliation. I couldn’t look in the face of my awkwardness, so I abandoned so many of her experiences. My memories are not there, except the one that won’t leave: my cousin — the one who passed, the one whose name I won’t say because I don’t know if I have his permission from the Other Side, beckoning to me to join the line. Everyone cheering me on, wanting me to dance and be a part of the family and the moment, and me refusing because I only had confidence in the classroom. I think back to that moment more than a decade later: my tall, handsome cousin in his buttoned-up dress shirt, inviting me to be a part of the family, to know intimacy with the family I grew up a social strata away from, and I turned away. I couldn’t do it.
What dances does an awkward child know? Where would I have found connection between my Spirit and body in the white institutions that I was banished to because I had intelligence to nurture? How can I dance with any authenticity when I’m the one who doesn’t belong?
Shame is a “painful feeling of…distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” So many memories that others would dismiss as a (relatable?) growing pain are the same that haunt me and shame me. These are the times I took for granted until after the very end.
Is that not what mourning is? Guilt over the times I didn’t hang longer in the basement and ask my cousin how he was doing? The times I didn’t call all of my aunts on Mother’s Day because I had to work on Monday? The times I wish I had not hidden myself but know that in 1,000 more tries, I would fail 1,000 more times.
By way of epilogues, Mom cried for years. She would lie for us, to us about feeling and getting better. I was told that I just didn’t get it, he was like a son to her. I wondered if I knew what it was like to have someone be like a brother, considering I do have siblings and I only project onto them what I believe that bond must mean. It’s not like I’ve actually lived it, as though I truly know them deeply and honestly. At night, I ask myself: Whose death will I break for?
