Death Of A King
It’s not just that it’s one thing added to another; it's multiplied.
2020 has been a year already and we have not even touched September at the time of this writing. For me personally, I started this year in frustration and grief about my body. I started off healing from a surgery without noting the toll it would take on my mental health to not be able to move the way I wanted to move and to be in a different consistent pain.
Looking back, this sounds like a foreshadowing of the year ahead. Yet, just the same as now, I remain hopeful. Collectively in the Black community we were hopeful about 2020, it was meant to be our year. That doesn't mean we weren’t still concerned about the foolishness we have been seeing generation after generation. It does mean we had plans to grow and change and do that damn thing. Before we were even fully in our 2020 stride, we lost Kobe Bryant in January. There were mixed emotions and conversations about it. Black folk, we were told by some people why we shouldn’t be in mourning for this loss. For some, this added another layer of grief as we lost friends, or were even more disconnected from people we thought saw us in our fullness, and would be able to allow us to have grief without being told how horrible a person we were for having it. Just as we started to move forward further into 2020, weighed already by the loss of this Black man, his child, and the others who were in that helicopter with them, we learned about COVID. I can’t lie, I remember not taking it as seriously myself. I remember thinking, “that's cool, I will make sure I wash my hand and keep my hands off my face.” But before we knew it, we were shut down. We couldn’t move the way we wanted, we were grieving the loss of Kobe, our freedom, the way we hoped 2020 would be, and the countless lives lost so quickly to COVID.
I could go on and on about how this year went, bringing us up to George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake’s shooting, and now the king of Wakanda himself, Chadwick Boseman, has died. The point is we have suffered much this year. People have moved from planning to do well and take beautiful strides, to hanging on with both hands and slipping a little more everyday. Folk have gone from being secure in housing, jobs, mental health, relationships etc, to being insecure real quick. Now, we know that Black folk are resilient, and have always been. Through it all we have found moments of levity and have sought out both rest and pleasure. However, somehow the death of Chadwick Boseman, seems to be hitting differently. It’s feeling like the final straw. It feeling like the tenuous hold we were having to jokingly talk about 2020, the ultimate sour patch kid, has moved over into a space of 2020 is trash and wanting to get in the bed and wake up in 2021--hopefully one that will have some act right and not feel like we are constantly being plagued with all the shit all at one thing after the other.
The thing is though to add one to the next, would be, not the wrong way to think about it, but rather incomplete. Yes, it is one thing added to the other, but when one hits it is also multiplied by everything else. Chadwicks death makes us think back to the death of Kobe and other Black icons we have lost this year (additive) but we feel all their deaths and collective loss, at once (multiplied). Chadwicks death also comes less than a week from Jacob Blake, who thankfully is still alive, but had a near death experience at the hands of white supremacy-- someone who had sparked conversation about feeling like Black people simply cannot catch a break. That we have one event on top of another, and in the midst of a whole deadly assed hurricane, and with the pandemic continuing, which we are over, but is apparently, not yet over us. This means we add this death to that, but that it hits even harder, enlarging the void we already have been feeling in the face of the things we have lost. But more than that, the loss of this king, also impacts super deeply because of how many of us have been proud and moved by the icons he has played on the screen from Jackie to T’Challa. We think about how long he has known of his own diagnosis and the body of work he also did during that time-knowing what he knew. We then think of our family members, and maybe even our own life situations, where we push through and do the work we feel must be done despite how we are feeling, despite what goes on with our bodies. We work. We provide. We serve as entertainment for friends who cannot or won’t see us as full dynamic people capable of more than just bubbly happy energy. We think about the times we have gone to work sick and kept the secret of just how sick, worried about how it could impact our paychecks, our livelihoods, and adding to, then multiplying, the stress and health issues we were facing.
It makes me so very hyper aware of the hands of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. How it bids us work and never asks us to rest. How we can give all of our time and energy but it still isn’t enough.
It makes me think about how we don’t give people the benefit of the doubt. How we are quick to talk shit knowing not a damn thing about what someone is going through. It makes me think about how we entertain ourselves by hurting other people--especially other Black people. Especially people who are darker than that brown paper bag. It makes me think about how many people in our lives right now are Chadwick, but without the money and fame. How many people are suffering with terminal or chronic illnesses that we don’t see because they are not using a wheelchair, cane, or other apparatus that we have deemed necessary to note, ignoring that disability looks differently on people. It also makes me think back to my last few years with fibroids. Being in constant pain, having the absolute worst periods of my life, about my hospital stay because of blood loss. I think of my sister's experience with it--but also how no one would say we were having an issue that required constant attention or maintenance. The point is, this grief is not just added to, but multiplied by. We add it to the collection of things that 2020 has given us, while multiplying it against our life experiences. Then we have to draw upon our inner resources to deal--inner resources that have been taxed to the max with everything else. That we have been using our coping skills for Kobe, COVID and more, means that we don’t have as much here. It means this becomes the proverbial straw. It also means that we carry this with us and have to push forward and continue to move, just as Chadwick did.
Remember when I said that how I started this year--unable to move how I would like and in pain, felt like a foreshadowing? That includes the healing too. The pain I was in, was a healing pain of the roots of a problem addressed. The pain of healing can persist, and at times feels worse than the other shit we were going through, but it does mean that we are capable of and are (hopefully) going to heal. It means we are in a huge pain now, but I still have hope, maybe erroneously so, that it is a healing pain. Sharp and deeply felt, but moving in a direction we finally need. Kobe’s death grabbed our attention, COVID slowed us down, and all of this threw the racism that has BEEN here into very sharp relief--sharp enough for white people to have finally caught on. Hate Trump though I may, I am appreciative that his blatant racism is seen and that folk are seeing that the issue didn’t start with this man, and having someone else in the office won’t stop the racism we have always known. We are not going to kumbaya our way through this one. We are having needed and painful conversations that will ultimately move toward the healing of America.
I once called for the Ragnarok we needed. I think we are getting it. I think we are knowing the depths of our country’s depravity and are able to cleanse it and really begin to heal. I think we are feeling it deeply. Noting what we have lost and why those losses feel as sharp as they do.
We are in the midst of our grief for the death of a king, but maybe we can still save a nation.
