Choose Life

 TRIGGER WARNING:  Discussion of suicide, death, and loss.

Two weekends ago, I sat between two very dear friends, behind the parents of a friend who could be better described as an acquaintance, a well-loved acquaintance but a woman to whom I'd never gotten very close, at a memorial service.  I was sad, I was angry, and I was very hurt and didn't know how to communicate these emotions.  I was sending X-ray beams to the back of her mother's head, pleading with her to see her, understand her, care about her.  And was then angry with myself for feeling that way.  For blaming her.  For wishing she'd cared more, tried harder, had given her daughter a break, just let her be.  That wasn't fair.  I know that.  

I'd run into this woman just a month before at Trader Joe's.  I was walking out as she was coming in and just starting her shopping and the exchange was brief, head nods and smiles, a wink.  I was in a rush and she seemed lost in thought or her list.  I'm really not sure.  I didn't think much of that exchange until a few weeks later when I learned that she'd taken her life.  She was dead.  I kept seeing her face looking down at that list.  I replayed every moment we'd been together, her asking me about something or other, talking about the wine at a party.  She was dead.  And then she was standing over me doing my make up as she'd just started selling Mary Kay cosmetics and needed someone to practice her technique and her sales pitch.  I'd said, "I didn't think you wore make up."  To which she replied, "I'm trying something new.  My mother always said I'd do better to wear some make up."  And I resented her mother for putting the idea into her head that she was not enough and reassured her she was.  At least that's what I think I did.  Maybe she thought I should just shut up because she was trying something new.  

She'd been a lawyer and was incredibly intelligent, more cerebral and intellectual than I (or so it seemed).  I'd met her through other friends and saw her most often in the company of the others, except for the afternoon that she did my make up and we talked about trying new things and make up and raising children, daughters in particular, (She has a daughter and a son.) and how beautiful my own mother is and how incredible my mother's skin is and that maybe she'd try Mary Kay.  This was nervous chatter.  Having her there doing my make up, so up close, trying to convince me to buy the lipstick, the shadow, and the face creams when I rarely wore make up and if I did I sought products that would look good on my brown skin, which to my mind Mark Kay was not such a product, made me uncomfortable.  I told her as much in a series of emails after our meeting.  I did not want to let her down, didn't want her to waste her product on someone who was not going to buy anything.  I wanted her to win.  I felt her need for approval, for acceptance.  And I was upset with her mother for saying she'd do better to wear make up because she clearly did not feel comfortable in it.

And she now was dead.  I hurt her hurt and retraced the steps I'd imagined she'd taken before that last, sudden, violent moment.  And as sublime as the moment seems in poetry, in story, in song, the truth of it, the starkness, the finality, and the violence broke me.  I thought I should have spoken to her at Trader Joe's.  Should have looked into her eyes and said something to her, whatever it might be, that might make her choose life one more day.  I thought of the acting exercise, "the private moment' where the actor lives a moment where he'd not expect anyone to see him, lets down his guard, experiences the moment unapologetically, unself-consciously, and I hurt all over again imagining those last moments.

Her family and friends were in tears, completely shattered and stunned.  There were photographs of her at various stages of her life and I racked my brain trying to recall if we'd ever taken photos at the dinners and parties we'd attended together.  I closed my eyes searching for her ghost in photos of us that were never taken.  I felt her loss in the world, in my world, but didn't have the proof.  Couldn't find a photo in my mind's files.  Looking across the aisle at her children, I thought of my own and those years ago in Barbados when the daily routine seemed impossible.  I remember the despair of postpartum depression and the loneliness of my marriage and the daunting prospect of attempting to live each day.  And I felt that cold breath, that sigh between here and somewhere else and the pull in my chest and the ache in my core as I struggled to choose life.  I don't feel at all close to that edge now but that feeling has never left me.

In a bedroom community outside of New York City, the sound of the passing trains is a common occurrence and every time I hear it now, it gives me pause.  I think of the photo of her as a young girl in a brimmed hat, looking so like a character from a novel, a kind-hearted innocent, a girl from another time and place.  Her eyes in that photo were so gentle and soft and sweet.  She, full of promise.  There is yellow light around her, framing her in a memory of a perfect moment in a perfect day.  I didn't know her then.  I also didn't know the young girl in the short hair that flipped at the sides, snuggling a bunny to her chin.  But I recognized the woman that she became in her gesture.  She was warm.  She was kind.  She was sweet and loving and good and she seemed, in that moment of love, so truthful, so vulnerable, and so present.  

And now she is dead.  I say dead because gone doesn't do the loss the justice it commands.  Gone could mean that when ready she could return and she won't.  I sat behind her mother who did not, could not speak at the service and searched her father's face as he spoke of her, his voice cracking and faltering as he tried to hold her in this world with a sweet memory,  for some answer that would explain why this happened.  I looked at her ex-husband and her children and all of her friends and colleagues.  I did not look in the faces of my dear friends who sat next to me but I did squeeze their hands.  

It is so lonely being a human being sometimes.  Even when you are sitting next to someone and holding their hands, when you are in a crowd, when you are being feted and loved and surrounded, when you are on a beautiful Caribbean island living the fantasy of so many, there can be illness, depression, pain, and despair that those around you cannot know unless you share, tell them, trust them.  It is truly a risk to take.  I get it more than I care to admit.  But it's a gift this life.  I believe it and I continue to choose it.  I hate considering making a decision that ends with this choice.  I hate that there is no one to blame no matter that I was clearly searching for someone.  That no one knew how deeply despaired she was, how she'd tired of it all, how what haunted her began to share this earthly plane with her and that her dreams were no longer a safe place to escape.  I hate it so much that I replay every breathing moment I know of her life and imagine the moment she took her last.  I want to be there for her, be her witness, acknowledge her just as she was and in my magical thinking, will her back to this plane.  But she is more than gone and she won't be back.

If you have suicidal thoughts, please seek help.  You can call 1-800-273-8255 twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind. 

Struggling not to fall

When I was a little girl, my family went on a trip to an ice skating rink.  I'd never been before, but as I was a young dancer and pretty proficient on the roller skates, I took to it pretty quickly.  I remember the cold and the sound of the blades on the ice and the whoosh-whoosh of the wind as I picked up speed.  It should have been such a freeing experience.  Here was something that felt a little like flying, where I could feel the air in my lungs clear and crisp, where I could whiz around the rink passing people, turning, and where feeling that special magic of being encapsulated in my own energy bubble should have brought me joy... and I was riddled with anxiety. 

My parents, who'd both come from humble beginnings, had not had the opportunities or privilege to participate in frivolous activities like skating and skiing and tennis or any of the extracurriculars my brother and sister and I were afforded.  Their after school activities were often connected to their schools or churches and they still had to make time for work and help around the home or farm.  That day at the rink, my dad was up on skates for the first time too but was thrown off balance, resting on the thin blades did not come naturally.  My father was and is a very solid guy.  He stands firmly on the ground and gives the appearance of such physical strength that I was well into adulthood when I realized that he was not as enormous as John Henry the steel driving man.  For him, skating was a challenge, but one he did not give up on.  I watched him make his way slowly around the rink, staying close to the side, shuffling along trying to get the hang of it.  I have always been sensitive and empathetic to others' struggles and have always beamed with pride at anyone's attempt at something new, something dangerous, something just beyond their reach.  But this was too much for my tiny, little heart.  To see my dad, probably the person I loved the most at that time, certainly looked up to (despite our incredible differences), working so hard, struggling, broke me and I cried and cried at his humanness.  My world turned upside down when I discovered that he was just a man.

I have not posted for a very long time because again I have been crying and crying.  Seriously.  I am in a state of absolute pain at my core.  The very real humanness of this struggle has poked and prodded at my heart and at my gut so that I just can't get much of a handle on what I believe anymore.  I feel the same sensation that I felt watching my father, my hero, struggle around that rink.  We are wobbling and tumbling and falling flat trying to get around this fucking rink. 

I am hurt and angered and saddened by the outcomes of every case involving a black person--man, woman, or child--being killed by the police.   I am insulted by the imagery being used to describe black boys and men--animals, monsters, overpowering, aggressive.  I cannot believe that the victims and their communities are being told that it is their lack of respect that has brought the pox on their houses.  I am hurt that the trigger is pulled so quickly and that the victim is then blamed for his past or the figure he cut on surveillance video as though those were reasons enough to kill an unarmed person.   But I have been destroyed, truly cut deep, by the efforts of friends and neighbors quick to explain to me either the absolute necessity of handling black people this way or in deflection about the tough, brave, good folks in law enforcement out there.  Of course there are good cops and good public servants.  We are not talking about that and you know it.  I never said, "Fuck the police," but I hear in the tone, in the explanation, and in the crazy, blue-cold silence, "Fuck that.  Their lives got nothing to do with me."

 I can see how easy it is for people, white people, to look at these all black communities, see their upset, their anger, their feelings and disassociate.  I know you don't know any of those people.  Truth be told, I don't either.  Not personally nor tangentially.  It's easy to imagine that somehow they don't want the same as you want for yours, that they are willing to destroy themselves and their communities because they "just don't care about themselves or their families or their communities" the same way you do.  It is easy to say if they'd done nothing wrong, they'd have nothing to feel guilty about.  It is easy to look at someone in a moment of terror or pain or frustration and read them all the way wrong. It is easy to apply your experience to the actions of people you don't know, to expect that they had every opportunity that you did and assume they are just making bad choices or are somehow deserving of the incredibly strict, harsh punishment (death) handed down for being #alivewhileblack.  But the most infuriating thing is how easy it is for you to just look away.

I grew up in your community.  There were a handful of brown and black faces and all the rest were white and your right to be there no matter your efforts, your intelligence, how clean, good, big your family was, your lawn, your car, your station, you knew the place was yours.  That you were free to skate.  There was judgment, there were microaggressions every day against my family and me.  There were assaults on my psyche if not on my physical self.  The same folks I saw in church would not even acknowledge me in the Pathmark.  A good friend's mother would rather he put himself in harm's way than possibly end up in my arms (He was gay, but there'd be a little time for her to discover that.).  A teacher at school told me that my white boyfriend and I were disgusting.  A popular student told me I was pretty but that his mother would kill him if he came home with someone black.   Going below the speed limit, friends and I were pulled over and though I was not driving, the officer told me to watch myself.  We were held up as the proof of diversity in your community, shown as a symbol to how open and available and post-racial we were despite all that. 

And you know what?  I did try.  I danced and shimmied at the parties, deflected when way off color jokes were told, kindly shot down hideous come-ons conjured by images of hot black chicks who can't get enough.  I put the rage and anger and fear in my art, moved to spiritualism and meditation and the quest for a higher power, for the sacred because being just human, a black, female human navigating life in this country that believed itself to be post-racial, post-Civil Rights movement was exhausting and lonely and frustrating.  I struggled to get my footing when, even though I was full of promise, I truly just could not find my way.  Even now, I still listen to people who want to tell me how they see my experience.  How they feel about what I am talking about.  How they think I am getting it all wrong, that I did not even grow up in "those communities."  How I am a different kind of black person.  I'm not.

I never feared for my life but was raised to be prepared for it.  Though my father did not know we knew, we'd seen the rifle given him by his father before we moved "up north."  The weapon that was to protect us in case "those white people got crazy."  We knew the stories of the South, knew that my dad and his brothers and cousins and uncles and all the men before them knew to cross the street if a white woman was walking on the same side of the sidewalk lest folks get the wrong idea and come after the.  Knew that they would not look white folks directly in the eye, that they would try to keep their tone down so as not to rile or rifle or scare white folks into craziness.  It wasn't my story but I knew it well enough.  It's in my DNA.  I knew that they endured all that and moved to this neighborhood, this town for a good job, good schools, greater opportunity, and a chance to skate around the fucking rink.

And when I say this hurts and it's bad and we have to change it, I am called to task for rushing to judgment about the police, about the policies in this country that have tied the arms and bound the legs of black people and black communities.  Yes, this is a class issue, the impossible gap between the very wealthy and the working poor is staggering, but there is no denying, no matter how hard one tries, that this is a racial issue.  That black people, whether they grew up in their own communities or interspersed with yours, whether they grew up poor, rich, middle class, went to college or did not, whether they sell cigarettes on the street corner or are ivy league professors or lawyers or ball players or scientists or students are viewed with fear and prejudice.  And even when you ask the people around you, more than likely also white and as inexperienced as you are, if it is at all possible that what "they" say is true, you are going to get back the answer you want, the one you expect, the one that let's you go to sleep at night while some of us are still awake and in tears watching vigilantly. 

I went to school with you, to dance class, to church.  I trick or treated with you and sang carols.  I took the SATS next to you and lent you a pencil.  If you don't believe people you don't know, trust me.  Slow your judgment of black people and black communities.  Sure there are bad apples.  But since you've never really exposed yourself to those communities, you cannot see the people who are working their tails off to succeed in a system that is set up to fail them. Even those of us who grew up in your affluent communities don't have your advantages.  And before you try to hold a mirror up to our successes, our achievements, let me tell you that nothing, nothing at all came easy and the road was paved not only with obstacles and sacrifices but hellishly racist shit that would spin your head.

When we are frustrated, all of us, all human beings, and we need to let off steam, to vent, we do the same things.  Scream, yell, vent, kick stuff.  I know it.  Now imagine in your frustration, in your pain, in your rage at injustice and disproportionately unfair treatment, there is little to no release.  You are locked in.  No one will feel your pain, no one will comfort you, no one will even acknowledge you.  No one will cradle your head, no one will even address how much you hurt but rather that you kicked the door in.  Imagine that your outrage, that your expression is met with judgment and lectures and invalidation.  Imagine that what you know is true is argued about and disputed and negated to your face by someone who has no idea about what you are speaking. 

All of us, all human beings want the same things.  We want to give all we can to our families, to see them do better than we have, to give them more, to leave the earth, to leave society, the world better than we found it.  There are little girls and boys all around the country watching their fathers skate around the rink, stumble, struggle.  They are beaming with pride, falling in love with their heroes, cluelessly believing that if their fathers could just make it around the rink that all will be right with the world, completely blissful in their ignorance, as open and trusting and hopeful as every one of you.  They are willing their fathers and mothers and families and communities to succeed, to make it around, to get better at it, to progress.  

I was a little black girl with big dreams.  I believed my dad could do anything.  To see him struggle, to see him fall, to see him in fear, to witness injustice, unfair treatment, judgment reserved for him only because he was black, hindrances and obstacles placed in his way, when I knew he'd worked so hard, climbed such heights, done so much, threatened to halt my conviction.  I could glide and spin and soar only when I knew he was safe.  That he could get to a place where he trusted himself too.  That he could falter and get up again.  We must find a way to talk about race, privilege, injustice or our only future is dystopian. There must be fundamental changes in policy, better training of police and civil servants.  But most importantly, we must see each other.

What frightened me most going around that rink was not that my father was so inexperienced.  It was that the really good skaters, the fast ones who'd been skating all their lives might knock him down and that he wouldn't get up.  That they'd zoom by so quickly they might rush over his fingers on the ice as he tried to right himself.  I was afraid for him, as I am afraid for us now, that he would just give up and never try again.  And he did.  And I hope we can too.


(c)  Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.