The Future Is Shorter and Meaner

I find it interesting that I decided to start this year by reading Toni Morrison’s Sula because I have owned the book for a couple years and I never really was ready to give it a read. I even missed the opportunity to join in the reading and conversations when the Smart Brown Girl Book Club read it in February 2020. For some reason, this year I went to the bookcase and felt like it was time to give it a read. Unbeknownst to me, a week after finishing the book my grandmother would lose her best friend and the fictitious grief and my real-life grief would collide. My grandmother is at the age where she is losing friends and family more frequently and I hate that for her on the one hand, but on the other hand I am grateful for it because she is still here with us. As with everything in this life as a Black woman, the loss and grief also shed light on the politics of life and what happens to our lives as we make it through our lives and ultimately to our death.

I’m learning some things about grief in this life as it happens more often and in more relationships. There are so many different types of grief, and it sucks that there really is no end in it. We grieve relationships and people, sometimes mislabeling one for the other and not acknowledging when we are even in a time of grief. As a surviving party in these different situations, I figure you just get better at coping, and you have to move on with less and less remorse. The last two and a half months have been very trying for my family and it is on par with the regular visit of chaos for us to experience another loss but that doesn’t stop me from wondering why and was it really time, was it necessary for another soul to go. I called my grandmother’s friend Grandma L because she was around for as long as I can remember, and she was my mother’s Godmother. She was one of the first kind adults I remember having in my life.

To me she was Grandma L. She was a tall woman who always wore her hair natural, whether it was in an afro that was always well shaped, or it was braided down on her head as she grew older. We all watched her hair slowly transition from salt and pepper to almost a complete head of gray hair. She was a quiet woman, but she held a strong and important presence. I remember her crown never tilting in my presence and thinking that she always had it all together. She had it together emotionally, financially, and any other way I could think of when it came to adults. I never witnessed her express sadness or anger although she was a widow for over 25 years, and she allowed us live with her for a little while when I was a child. At one point she opened her home to us during one of the stints when my parents decided to call it quits (temporarily). Imagine being middle aged with a grown son, and having a three-bedroom apartment to yourself free to as you please yet you agree to open it up to a party of three including two children under the age of 10? That was what she did, and she never yelled at us to stop running, bumping, etc. Being 35 and having two kids of my own I cannot imagine how difficult that time could have been for her. I always have appreciated her for everything, and I pray that she felt that before she left us. In life she was always accommodating, and kind and it seems she will do the same in her afterlife.

She shared with her closest loved ones her with for a simple cremation and it being up to her son to decide whether there will be a memorial service or not. That part is the saddest to me, because I feel in these times there should and would be people to come out and share the stories of awe and how their lives intertwined for a little bit of time and how their life would be quite different it was not for their relationship no matter how small. The opportunity to share and release that energy seems so necessary to me, it seems almost like a robbing her of her opportunity to take her full essence along the way into the afterlife. Thinking about her life, the little bit I knew and experienced with her, it saddens me that this is her end.

On a different hand it hurts me because the actuality that this could be and is the end for a lot of people is saddening. In Sula, Sula made her bed and died in it, so to speak. The relationships she had were what she made them and ended up dying alone without her only friend. In this case life made the bed for Grandma L and she died in it alone, much the same as Sula. In both cases there are structural policies and demographics at fault for some of the circumstances and it is sad to think about all around She was a widow, she only had one child who never married or had any children of his own so her story ends with him. Our memories of her are important but her mark, her presence, her lineage and bloodline end with him. It’s sad to think of the world with one less tall, kind, and compassionate person to be around. Then I think of how many people die and take their gifts with them, they die and are the end of the line for their lineage and their people. Then thinking outside of myself, I wonder was this the way the ancestors saw fit or did the unnatural win and snuff out these people? It all seems so very wrong and for so many different reasons.

Grief is a thing that stays with us it is the darkness and grey in life. It is a part of the balance of life and serves as a reminder that life is temporary. The limited nature of life makes every second and the consequences for decisions count that much more. There is a cost for everything and it needs to be factored into the decision-making process. All of the current American political mess is outrageous when there are literal people living/surviving in areas throughout the country with no help from anyone. There should not be anyone waiting to have their corpse picked up until insurance paperwork is located, there should not be housing uncertainty for anyone who cared for an ailing parent, there should not be a person who just feels like they are forgotten. I think about the Disney/Pixar film CoCo and the importance of Dia de los Muertos (I hope I got that right), overall the theme of remembering the deceased loved ones, ancestors. What a luxury it is to have an ancestor to remember, what about the people fighting to be remembered while they are still among the land of the living? What do you/we do about that, how does that feel?

I can go on about my qualms about ordinary people and how they are lost in history but that’s another discussion for another time. In this time, I’m just writing through my grief and making note of how a feeling led me to a story of sorts which kind of softened my spirit for the upcoming event. Coincidence or not, it was timely.