By the time my dad had turned 50 years old, he’d already survived two heart attacks. He died at the age of 52 after suffering complications from pulmonary hypertension. I was 22 years old and on my way to social work school in New York. My journey with grief didn’t begin with my dad’s passing, but in 2015, when he died, I did have to learn to cope with a loss that was unimaginable just a few years before.
When I reflect on my dad’s life and the grief I’ve come to know as a companion, I have the space to widen the lens and can capture a fuller picture of my grief, with the collective grief of Black America. The stories overlap. The experiences are indistinguishable.
I lost my dad the summer after we lost Mike Brown, three years after Trayvon Martin was killed, ten days after Sandra Bland died. A year before the highly-celebrated documentary 13th was released.
And while my dad was not incarcerated in prison, or shot by police, the experience as a Black man born in Newport News, Virginia in the 1960s cannot escape the cruel shadow of racism. My dad dreamt of going to the Virginia Military Institute to pursue a career in the armed service. His parents, my grandparents, drove him up to the school, dropped him off, and had to collect him 12 days later.
He wouldn’t speak about what happened to him there. Instead, he sat in the house for one or two days and then went to register for classes at Christopher Newport Community College.
He died a Major in the Air Force, traveled to Germany, and Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He’d survived two heart attacks in his 40s. Was notoriously an early riser and stayed up late to make time for hobbies to avoid the hamster wheel.
He seldom drank out of fear of repeating the cycle of alcoholism he’d witness. He told me stories of my Aunt Sandra whom I never met. She died when he was 12 years old. His father died a year and a day before I was born from congestive heart failure.
What I effectively want to convey is that the grief I felt and feel from losing my dad includes the loss we have felt as a community. Loved ones gone too soon.
What I have learned, wading through the depths of reflection, and leaning into pain, is that the pain we feel is not solitary. When I pray for the ancestors whose names I know, including my father, I thank those who I never got to meet, never heard about, for their service in protecting and guiding me. I ask God to strengthen them in their rest and work, for those who have good intentions and love towards me and those who are with me now.
What I have learned, wading through the memories, is that even our experiences and how we remember things is colored by our experience walking on this earth in our skin. Our grief directly involves the racism, microagressions, anger, joy, love, and hope of those we’ve lost and those we’ve never met.
Black grief is wrapped up in centuries and generations of unanswered questions, trauma, unknown stories whose burdens we shoulder in our very DNA. It’s not a linear or 5-step process; our grief is our own, complicated. And hard.
Black grief is layered and complex. And sometimes when we’re crying, the tears we’re shedding are assigned to a different pain than that which is on our mind or heart; a language between our spirits and the challenges we meet along life’s journey.
There’s no easy place to stop when we’re talking about those we’ve lost, and because they live on, with us in spirit, I’ll end here, for now, a comma.
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