Nov 7, 2021
Grief + Loss
On their twelve episode of Surviving the City Podcast, co-hosts, Vicky & Key focus ‘On Grieving & Loss.’ The discussion arrives to me at the intersection of a few things: the recent Day of the Dead (Dia De Los Muertos), Halloween (or Hallow’s Eve/All Saint’s Eve); as well as the second November during a global pandemic courtesy of COVID-19, Scorpio season and it’s affinity to death (albeit metaphor for intense transformation) and Autumn, also associated in Northern Hemisphere regions with change, transition and a ‘closing up’ for the oncoming winter season.
Even more personally, the episode comes the same week as the passing of a family member. A cousin of my father but more or less like an uncle.
Death is part of the human condition and not only will we all die someday — And that, in and of itself will affect/inspire how we move about our lives — But others around us will also transition and we often have little to no control over when or how we may lose the people we know and/or love, our relationship to this fact is shaped by various ancillary experiences, some that immediately come to mind are those surrounding how we feel about memory, control, and expression. The way we believe a person should be remembered, the way we wish to have more control over our feelings or protection for those we might lose, leading to feelings of deep guilt, shame or helplessness when we do in fact lose them, and our ability to somehow accept and make sense of what can initially seem senseless (feelings without definition).
These all play a role in how we process grief. Along with many other factors. And as you can imagine, there are then, as many ways for grieving as there are individuals — More so actually, because even individuals have various ways of grieving different people, events, and circumstances.
This episode really made me think of everyone who’s passed on in my life. I hadn’t realized just how many people I know that are no longer here. I can no longer count them on just ten fingers: Three grandparents, out of the four who were all present during my childhood. Many uncles and aunties, some who fell gradually ill and others who suddenly died. Also neighbors who were older, some parents, grandparents, or aunts to some of my friends. And of course friends who were around my age and died as young adults. The first love of my life is among that group, passing just a few years ago — And while we had long before transcended any romantic connection, preferring to instead remain really good friends; with little ambivalence between us about what we meant to one another, her death still leaves her life unresolved to me. Because she was 31 (same age as me at the time) and the rest of her potential life now remains a mystery.
Memory and grief are so linked that it can be hard to distinguish remembering from grieving; but you can get to a point where you don’t seek the frequent memories to honor a lifelong project of not forgetting the person, instead you let the memories come to you when they do, without judgement of their frequency, impact or response.
What I was even more surprised to remember, after listening to this episode, are the earliest memories of death which happened during my childhood. Meeting a great-grandmother on a trip to DR once, in her sickbed; or sharing a birthday party with another kid, who’s dad was friends with my dad — The kid passed away some time after, I don’t even remember his name but he died maybe a year or two before reaching age ten. Also an elementary school classmate, who’s baby brother ran into the street and was killed by a car. I’m not sure how these deaths affected me, I rarely ever thought of them. I can’t remember how I felt at the time beyond a vague sense of quiet observance. A feeling that simply said, ‘notice’ even if I didn’t feel sadness, anger or any other definable emotion.
The first death that actually hit me in a very apparent way wasn’t even the death of a human, it was a super friendly street cat from my block when I was about 19 or 20. One evening my friends, sisters and I were on our front stoop and a random cat just came to us, sat on the steps and received, I’m assuming, the kind of attention and affection that convinced him he found some cool humans to hang around. I named him Picasso and he lived in a hole in the sidewalk that led to a spacious crevice outside the abandoned building next to mine.
Two neighbors fed Picasso daily, one eventually took him to a vet and he came back with a collar which we all ragged on, cuz he seemed all proud and conceited. He was like one of the homies by then. We called him Pic for short. At some point another cat was living with him in the hole, and we joked he got himself a boo thang.
Like my classmate’s baby brother, Pic was also hit by a car. At night on our block, while running into the street while playfully chased by another cat (not boo thang) from the neighborhood. My friends and I ran to him and watched Pic take his last breath. Dark, glistening blood pouring out his tiny mouth and an eye slightly popped out the socket. Seeing death is wild but seeing sudden death, the random change of circumstances through which healthy, unharmed life which was here just an hour or even a minute ago, ceases to be — And how clumsy a living thing emptied of life looks. We were shocked at how death can deplete life so instantly; how being alive keeps you in a familiar tension that seems both clever and composed — If you’ve ever seen a familiar loved one in a casket you know that unfamiliar relaxation that now presents them so still and strangely to you, it’s different from sleep.
Pic was a cat and as sad as that was, it’s a fact that some people experience this kind of traumatic account involving other humans. Friends or loved ones or even strangers they witness suddenly die. I think immediately of the 2pac song, ‘Lord Knows’ which begins with muttering ‘damn, another funeral — ’ And later in the third verse Pac rhymes ‘gangbanging’ with ‘brains hanging’ as he describes a scene where he holds a friend in his arms, who’s been shot in the head. Continuing: ‘fucked up! / I had to tell em it was alright / and that’s a lie, and he knew when he shook and died…”
I wasn’t there to witness my classmate’s little brother get hit by a car. But Pic’s death was a window into the memory of that fact. Another elementary school classmate lost his younger brother, years later, when the brother was a teenager, to gun violence. I don’t know how I would process seeing what I saw with Picasso or worse, happen to a human, especially one as close as a sibling.
But looking back on it now, knowing this was maybe a year after my grandmother had passed (the second of the three grandparents to go, but definitely the most familiar at the time), who lived with me in the same household — She died two days before 9/11 — I know Pic’s death was a portal to processing various things. Because it was the first time death made me angry. By that time, I had collected a somewhat cynical outlook from out my teenage years as I stepped into adulthood and realized more people will start dying now — My grandmother will be proceeded by many other older relatives whose time will also come. In addition to that, Pic made me process that death is random, it’s not just reserved for the elderly and sick. anyone can get it.
None of this made me angry per se, it was rather knowing how fragile life can be and then seeing conventions, institutions, and systems disregard life. ‘Life is precious where life is precious’ I’ve heard abolitionist/activist, Ruth Gilmore Wilson say — It’s seeing the ways life can be treated as less than precious that especially during that time, made me very angry. And unlike my childhood where my observations went undocumented, the impressions of my early 20s went right into my music. Listening to some of those recordings today, I’m left awe-struck by my morbidity and paranoia, mentions of death were as frequent as strippers or cars in a Drake song. Mind you, I wasn’t chasing death or running away from it, it was more like an on-going mental dance with death, choosing death’s hand over any un-precious version of life.
The sense of misplaced value was a constant theme; religion, social status, futurism and labor were unfairly at the top of the list of things I strongly felt distracted from a precious life. I say ‘unfairly’ cuz I definitely leaned on the most negative aspects of these things. I think I grieved the absence of something about the world, as I understood it then, throughout that entire decade. In between this, there were indeed moments of incredible joy, growth, appreciation, friendships, love, and peace, because life is fortunately, a complicated contradiction like that. It wasn’t till my 30s though, that I found the kind of distance that helped reconcile that angst. Giving what I would call my ‘spiritual instincts’ room to breathe.
It doesn’t mean I’m any less affected by grief and loss. In fact, Key brought up the loss of identity in the episode, which I definitely have related to in recent years. Also, certain deaths just take you by surprise (whether sudden or gradual) with no protection afforded by your spiritual journey. Spirituality, for me, doesn’t mean I no longer experience grief and loss — It just helps me not resist what feelings come up and understand the role expression can play in accepting those feelings in the present. Going back to memory, control, and expression, spirituality helps guide my experience through each of these to varying but nonetheless positively transformative affects.
I highly recommend this episode of Surviving the City, while I primarily spoke about grief and loss here as it pertains to death, perhaps because of the recently departed cousin, the episode traverses many facets of grief based on the many different things that can be loss. If you’re able to reflect afterwards, regarding your experiences with either, I’d suggest you do so. Whether it’s a private meditation or a conversation with another person, whether two minutes or two hours or two days, whatever works best for you — It might be worth noting what comes up.
Dr. Kate Marvel in a piece, published by On Being, regarding climate crisis, states ‘grief’ and not ‘despair’ is the opposite of hope. I believe she does so more out of poetic expression than demanding we link the two words in this explicit way. Nevertheless, I kept thinking about grief in this way while listening to the episode. Also during this moment in time where maybe hope, for all its great attributes, isn’t for some, quite what’s called for or even what’s available, and therefore what change may come, what transition and transformation awaits us, might be a matter of now sitting with, expressing and/or practicing our grief.
RIP: Leo, Oscar, Tio Freddi, Jessy, Omar, Raf, Tia/Madrina Cira, Tio Pepe, Tio Elias, Prima Celeste, Tio Caco, Papa Betilio, Mama Dominga, Papa Miguel, Lucas Sr., Mr. Charles, Sandra, Brian, and everyone who’s name I was too young and the meeting too brief to remember but surfaced at some point when I was old enough to think about it…& RIP Picasso (meow)
