Black Does Crack

Today marks another year since my father’s death.

In the seconds, minutes, and hours in between, I have learned that grief is not something we efficiently “get over” and that despite what many of us were taught, grief isn’t a test you pass, a hill you climb, or a season that simply ends. As a clinician, I now understand that grief is less something we resolve and more something we integrate. That we can become experts at learning to carry it differently, unaware that carrying it is not the same as being free from it.

In Black families, we learn early how to survive loss. We hear, “God doesn’t make mistakes.” We hear, “Just trust God.” We hear, “He wouldn’t want you to sit around crying.” We hear, “You have to be strong.” And then, after all the appropriate ceremonies, calls and check-up-ons are over and everybody else gets back to work on Monday, we’re expected to keep moving too. We’re expected to go on as though it is just another Monday and that you hadn’t just spent the past few days trying to find all the pieces of your heart that shattered and scattered to God knows where.

Because that is what our people did.

Our grandparents carried grief while picking cotton, cleaning other people’s houses/toilets, working factory shifts, raising children (theirs and others’), burying loved ones too soon, and somehow still made it to church on Sunday morning. They taught us resilience, because well, resilience was all they had in abundance . But what I’ve come to understand is that resilience and healing are not the same thing. I’ve come to understand that, sometimes in our community, silence gets mistaken for strength. We have become experts at functioning while heartbroken. Not only do we show up, we excel. We handle business… personal, social, academic and professional.

But grief does not disappear simply because we’re [high] functioning. It waits. That motherf*cker is patient! It shows up early and appropriately dressed on anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, in songs, photographs, text messages, cards and letters. It shows up in glimpses you catch in others that remind you of the face you’ve been missing and leaves you wondering if they had always looked like him/her and you’re just now noticing because, well, you’re searching for them.

Now, let me personalize this. Today, what hurts most is the feeling of being unanchored.

Daddy was, and in many ways still is, my favorite person.

What I miss is not only his presence. I miss the anchoring that came with it. There is a particular ache that comes from losing the person whose face reflected your own, whose laugh sounded familiar because some part of it lived in you too. I miss seeing myself reflected in another human being’s behavior. I miss the familiarity of his existence which helped to explain mine. I miss the crinkle at the corners of his eyes which created the perfect backdrop for the twinkle when he looked at me. I miss, without having to look in a mirror, knowing I reflected the same back at him because I felt it on my soul. I miss knowing there was someone in the world who loved every version of me. I miss someone who could look at me and see not just who I am but feel pride knowing he had something to do with it.

The clinical language says grief is the cost of attachment. My lived language confirms that grief is love with nowhere to go. And if that is true, then this ache is not evidence that I haven’t healed. It is evidence that I loved deeply and was loved deeply in return. So today, I will not be trying to “be strong.” I will be allowing myself to remember. I will be allowing myself to miss him. I will be allowing myself to tell the truth about what his absence costs me. Every second, minute, and hour. Beauties, listen, healing is not pretending the loss no longer hurts. Healing is making room for the hurt and continuing to live anyway. Mess and all.

Daddy’s absence remains one of the great sorrows of my life. His love remains one of its greatest gifts. Death took his physical presence, but it could not take his imprint. I continue to see him in my values. I hear him in my words and my laughter. I feel him in certain tilts of my head. I recognize him in my resilience. And my classiness. And on some absolutely miraculous days, when I catch my reflection just right, I swear I see him looking back at me.

Daddy, you will forever be my favorite person. And my heart breaks and heals, breaks and heals, breaks and heals, heals and breaks, whenever I remember that I was yours.

I love you. Forever.