All the grief I know is simply another form of longing
I saw the recent news of the profession in Cambridge. I have been writing about this collision of Blackness and academia and what whiteness demands of us in particular. Writing about the terror that is atmospheric when you are Black and alive. I was then reminded of something I wrote in the past that is as evergreen as this news is. There are not many words I have but these are some memories.
Over the years I have made so many attempts at forgiveness but all too often I succumb to observation. Death hovers over everything. Always just above the surface of my living. It is Thursday and I am on my way to another funeral. Statistically speaking, I am now at mid-life.
In 2023, spring had almost decided to stay and my cousin died suddenly. I had spoken to her on the phone just a couple weeks prior to plan my first major trip home. I had been back to Philadelphia sporadically over the last decade but I stopped crossing the river after my mother died. We were going to the powwow. I would rent a car and head over the bridge to pick her up and we'd drive down together. Our last trip down was for another funeral so this moment felt auspicious.
I grew up going between Philadelphia, Palmyra, NJ, and Cheswold, DE and I have kept those connections with me even after I moved for graduate school. Almost all of my family is buried in the same cemetery in Delaware and my cousin was hoping to move down there too. Every time we talked she asked when I was coming back home.
Hope is something of an immateriality but it was the force that propelled her body out of bed for as long as it was able.
I saved her voicemails as an attempt at reverence. I want to say that I was strong. That I returned home to honor her life but each time I shut a door I sobbed. My cousin died in the way that many Native women die and confronting the particular type of briefness that is Native life in the United States, filled me with dread. Perhaps the most expected thing to happen to Native women is precisely this. A sudden and seismic absence that communities carry, bonded to their marrow that aches every time it rains. Worse still are the moments after that reveal how such loss has festered and like an acid has corroded the nervous system leaving it frayed at the edges. We spend all the time we have left mending what is right in front of us, and so little time left for our futures.
All the grief I know is simply another form of longing.
Once I ran away to the river just to see how far I could go. Hours laying, my tongue wrestling with a memory of something from long ago still hardening into the shape of my mother and her mother and her mother. How many times have my hands reached for my throat, water everywhere in front of me? I have nothing to offer but my body. It feels selfish to not want the future.
Toni Morrison has said “sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part.” This is the conundrum of living. That survival is partial and yet for us, for Black people, for Native people, it is all we have and thus it is everything. I have spent the majority of my short life fragmented. I say majority to avoid the risk of hyperbole but truthfully I have few memories that are not sutured together in an attempt at sentimentalism. Survival then is this type of persistence that remains in spite of the overwhelming weight of dissatisfaction with the present and the past.
My cousin was also dissatisfied and tormented and coped with such depth of feeling in the way she knew. That any of us survive the corrosive conditions of colonialism and supremacy and the decay it induces and demands within our bodies, in a physical, social, emotional, and mental sense, is astounding. Our living in this country is a feat and perhaps also the reason so many do not. And those that do, already, once again have their eyes trained to the ground attempting to lift whatever pieces of hearts we have left.
