Fight. Flee. Freeze. Fawn.

The Grief of Yesterday

Two years ago today, I flew back to New Jersey after unexpectedly having to bury my mother. And for the past two years, each day has been an exercise (mostly) and an adventure (sometimes) in learning to live without her. I’m not huge on big pronouncements about life experiences, because grief is one of the most individual of universal experiences. But I do know that I never properly anticipate the days that will make me most sad. This year, I braced myself for the anniversary of her death and got through it mostly okay. Then I thought I would be sad on the anniversary of her funeral, and I was, but I was functional. I woke up this morning and did not want to leave my bed. The ability to detach in the midst of personal catastrophe is a strategy honed early. And I am often surprised when the veil of detachment slips away.

Yesterday, I practiced detachment deliberately, because unlike the mother I lost, who I loved with every stitch of my being, the country that we lost yesterday, evokes a complicated grief. This is the homeplace of my most immediately knowable ancestors, and it is the place of my birth. But it is also a place whose bread and butter is inducing structural misery and fear for the vulnerable and it is hard to love that. Hard to grieve that.

One of the ways my father liked to terrorize my mother (and me by extension) was by breaking into our house while she and I were out, visiting friends or family. When we came home and started to go about our nightly routine, he would pick his moment and pop out of a dark room where he had been hiding.

It’s the kind of thing that produces hypervigilant Black girls, hopelessly devoted to their mothers. I made it my mission in those years when my father was our family terrorist to be the best daughter I could. And I was. While my mother set herself to the task of neutralizing the threat at our house, a feat which she accomplished and which made her my hero, I became an overachieving Black girl because that seemed the pathway to avoid a second generation of the nonsense.

When my mother got sick, I tried to see around every corner. I just knew I had the tools, education, advocacy, political understanding, class status – tools she had sacrificed for me to have – to save her.

Despite her valiant efforts and mine, she slipped away anyway. And I felt like I failed. Many days, I still do.

Yesterday, despite the hypervigilance of a bunch of overachieving Black women, a country slipped through our fingers. And it is a failure, though I’m not sure it is ours. But that is me trying to be reasonable. Grief and anxiety do not share the language of reason.

Grief is its own language. It is a language to make sense of a world, a home, a person that no longer exists.

The 20^th century project died yesterday. It started dying on November 5^th. It started dying on an escalator in 2015. It started dying on November 4, 2008, on August 29, 2005, on September 11, 2001, on December 4, 1969, on April 4, 1968.

Like so many overachieving daughters, for the first year, I went copiously back through key dates of my mother’s ordeal, thinking of which corners I did not see around, re-thinking my strategies, wondering if I had done any number of things differently, if we might have a different outcome. I still find myself doing it, while running errands or washing dishes, or waking to start the day.

Sometimes you never figure out when the dying started. What matters is the day you wake up and realize that a thing, a person, a homeland, a possible brighter, happier, more joyous future has died. That there is no going back. (Peace to Altadena)

The 20^th Century Project is dead. And for some this is cause for rejoicing. It is the end of empire, yes. But the empire don’t know that yet. It is still in denial. Violent denial. It is still breaking into houses where it does not belong, terrorizing the vulnerable.

The American Propagandists like to think of it as the Great American Century. It is the century where we cemented our status as the most powerful empire on Earth. It is the century that some foolishly declared the end of history. It is the white womb to which 75,000,000 Americans voted in November to return. None of this is the source of my grief, although if we are honest, about the way empire lives in us, it has been nice to experience fully the wins of this place that most of my ancestors never got to experience.

The 20^th century project was also the Club Women’s Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the birth of a Black professional class, the Great Migration that gave us Black cities all over the country. The 20^th century was beautiful Black television and movies and soundtracks. It was Blues and Jazz and Rock Roll. It was Soul and RnB and Neosoul. It was Hip Hop.

R. Kelly is in jail. Puff Daddy is in jail. Bill Cosby is just back from jail. Luther, Whitney and Michael are gone. Snoop is a traitor. Nelly remains the tip drill ass ho, he always was.

And a madman has been given ultimate power to hide in dark rooms of his making and pop out on whatever vulnerable group he will.

So I woke up this morning bereft. Not over the death of an evil empire, but rather in grief over the death of the known universe. The universe that gave us the Harlem Renaissance and Hip Hop was a universe with a limitless horizon for Black creativity and possibility. The universe with my mama and me here together.

Per Octavia, the Patron Saint of Seeing Around Corners, I know that God is change.

But God, this change.

I’m tired of it. Utterly exhausted by it. Wary of it Weary of it.

These last two years change ain’t been my friend. Sometimes when I meet the hyperradical folks ready for revolution to come, I think to myself, either you must have lost everything or you have never lost anything. (Mostly it’s the latter.) Either you’ve always had everything (and don’t know how good you’ve got it) or you never had anything. (Mostly it’s the former).

Lest I be accused of trying to inspire empathy for those, who being afraid of changes that have benefited the poor, the Brown, the queer, have chosen to undo every bit of ground gained over the last 150 years, I am simply saying that feeling powerless against the winds of change can beget a certain kind of destruction.

On the right, they externalize their fear making it our national problem. On the left we internalize it, ripping our coalitional bodies to shreds. And we Black girls metabolize it (though our bellies cannot take it), trying to outrun the exigencies of life, with our degrees and our training and our trauma-informed superpower of seeing around corners.

Until one day, we wake up and death has come anyway, and the bad man is in the house, and all our heroic efforts cannot exorcise him. And we are forced to deal. To fight or flee or freeze or fawn. We will see every version of a trauma response in these coming terrible days.

I do not know how to go forward. I do not have any pretty words. No platitudes or solutions. I have not had any such insights for the last two years. I do remember how the concrete tomb in which my mother is buried felt underneath my hands, as I left her body in the graveyard. Cold. Hard. And I guess one thing I do know, the one thing that beckons me back toward life, is that eventually we leave the graveyard. They are no place for the living.