(rewritten from original post at now inactive website, menahprattclarke.com)
I have been thinking about the circle of life: the miracle birth from literally out of thin air or no where, and death, the seeming disappearance into thin air, or no where. Death seems ever present on social media posts and in news stories: gun violence at schools and universities and in homes; car accidents; suicides of those who are important and seemingly loved, and those who no one knows their name; sudden immediate heart attacks; assassinations like Martin Luther King, Jr. or political prisoners in other countries, or by police in this country; and slow and long goodbyes through Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Sometimes it isn’t death, but the anticipation of death with an unexpected diagnosis of illness, cancer, or an unpronounceable disease and the never ending treks to doctors, clinics, and hospitals, to hopefully be graced with more time in life, to do something, to make a difference, to perhaps love and be loved more; to maybe find love; to see something different and fantastic in the world; to experience splendor; to say something to someone, maybe about forgiveness; to hug and kiss a friend; to reconcile; or to just be, by the sea, in the forest; in the world, touching flowers; playing with turtles and butterflies with a little girl.
Recently, I was returning on a flight and the pilot announced that are plane was carrying the body of a soldier who had died “serving his country” and his body was being transported on the plane to his family. The pilot solemnly shared that prior to the take off a firetruck would symbolically hose the plane in honor of the unnamed soldier (a water salute), a ritual token of respect for the remains of a soldier killed in action.
I wondered if this unnamed “young man’s” spirit was aware of the water salute. If not, then for whom was the salute? Maybe it was for those of us on the plane, to reflect and pause, on the tension between us flying high at 30,000 feet alive, and him flying high at 30,000 feet, dead. The plane was carrying the living and the dead.
When we arrived at our destination, his grieving family waited next to the plane, along side the hearse. 6 military pallbearers stood at attention waiting for his body to be removed from the plane to carry and escort their “fallen brother” into the hearse.
As passengers we watched, reverently, and perhaps inevitably reflecting on our own mortality for we all die and what will happen to us? Who will carry our coffin or urn? Will we be saluted and honored? We will die surrounded by loved ones, or will we die alone, in the cold night of Buffalo snow storms.
And, then, it is not only about death and dying. It is the agony of the pain of those who are the loved ones; grieving without relief; tears that are seemingly unending in a world that provides no forum or process or meaningful ritual for grief and its stabbing and punching, creating upheavals of sighs and screams that are too loud to come out and so often become gut wrenching and heaving internal wounds.
And then, there is the miracle of birth and rebirth. I’m becoming more intrigue about rebirth and the ways in which the energy of life continues its determined path to appear and reappear. The importance of memories and memorials; tributes; honorary acknowledgements, so that the spirit of the person lives on, and in fact, perhaps is reborn as pure energy, without the constraints of a body.
There have been multiple periods in my life when I have studied death and the afterlife. Times I considered and attempted suicide and times I experience inextricable knife of grief where I believed the only out was suicide. I gained great peace in exploring death. Several texts were intriguing and fascinating. In particular, the Afterlife of Billy Fingers was a fabulous read.
It made me think differently about life and how I wanted to live my life. Five years ago, after the suicide of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two seemingly very successful White man and White woman, I wrote a blog post called death and dreadlocks. I reflected that no one was writing about the Black boy who killed himself that my beautician had to twist the deadlocks on his dead head before being sealed and buried in a casket. I wrote:
My beautician, a beautiful woman, who from day 1, washed my hair with a love my dreadlocks have never known before: sudsing, caressing, massaging, rinsing, and repeating; sudsing, caressing, massaging, rinsing, and repeating; the warm water, always just the right temperature, running like a stream through every part in my head, with love. A soothing inquiring, genuine caring voice filled with love, “you doing ok today?” A love that she knows she must show to the Black women and men that come to the beauty shop, seeking love that they do not know they are seeking. She shows our hair that love, and through her hands, we feel it, not just on our hair, but on our heads, our minds, our souls, and our spirits. Love.
Her hands on my hair are different than my mother’s hands on my hair, when as a child, she sat me between her legs. Not that there wasn’t love, but it was different, a practical urgency, a list of things to do, of which one was combing thick hair, often knotted and kinky after washing, feisty, furious, demanding attention and love, but often only getting the attention of the comb, pulling, parting, the Oil Sheen, and a rough but persistent pulling and tugging and braiding. My hair was on a long lists of to-dos: cooking meals; laundry; grading papers; preparing for class; taking children to music lessons; fighting racism, sexism, oppression, discrimination, disrespect daily. Not much time for showing love, certainly not while braiding hair. It was about expediency. It was about getting the job done.
My beautician never rushes to get the job done. Because her job of showing love, cannot be rushed, like a good soul food meal, like gumbo, like real love-making that lasts for hours, it cannot be rushed, because love can’t be rushed. Today, I got my hair done, and I felt love and in that shared sacred space of submissiveness and trust, she shared her sorrow…and her courage. She shared why she rescheduled me to today, because yesterday, yesterday, she had to twist the dreads, at the funeral home, with the mother and girlfriend next to the dead body, rubbing and comforting the dead boy, with a combination of anger and grief. My beautician had to twist the dreads of a dead black boy…to make him pretty, to be buried.
She shared how she had to be strong, to keep it together, to not shed tears, so she could make him look good. She shared how her fiancé drove her to the funeral home; sat in his car, waiting for her, being strong for her, close, yet far, and how she focused on each and every dreadlock, twisting it. And I know, she twisted it with love.
Perhaps it was a love he never really felt in life.
In that post, I wrote about watching my mother die in our house and I wrote as I wondered then and wonder now:
Where did she go? Where do they go? Into the air? What happened? Ah, I often think this is a great sin of Western American European culture…an absolute arrogance and failure to honor, recognize, celebrate, and educate about death in any meaningful way. The Christian pervasive tradition of hell or heaven or maybe purgatory and some grace, depending on whether the God or Jesus of your life liked you, or you prayed enough, or you read the Bible enough, or gave enough tithes, or served as a usher, or sang in the choir, or gave food to the hungry, housing to the homeless, and kindness to the stranger, or visited the inmates. The high bar of holiness and sanctity meant only priests and nuns (those who weren’t mean and those who didn’t abuse) who could ascend to the holy of holies. The rest of the pagans and heathens—the masses—never touched by the divine Hand of God were doomed to never never land.
What happens at death?
I’m often disappointed in the seeming inability of religion to “get it right,” and do what it should do to comfort, encourage, uplift, and not condemn, judge, and create fear.
But, I continue to seek that spiritual manna that should feed my soul and to seek those souls and angels and spirits that have found new forms. One of those souls is Mama. Mama has reappeared in different ways in my life. She manifested herself from the spirit world into the earthly plane on to an answering machine in a true miraculous act to let me know there was another plane and energy field where she is. We don’t talk enough about these manifestations because we barely have words to talk about death, and nothing to talk about rebirth. So, we keep these secrets hidden in our hearts and spirits and journals. I share more in my upcoming book: Revelation and Revolution: A Black Girlhood Journey (2024 with She Writes Press).
But, because I know Mama is still “alive,” I will visit her next week at Illinois Wesleyan. For the first time in 10 years, I will return to the chapel where we said our “temporary goodbye,” at the service we held for her to recite poetry and sing songs, yes, literally performing at her own funeral. She, the amazing woman, in her 80s who took music lessons and recorded two DVD with specific instructions to play them at her funeral. You can watch her videos here:
And so, I will not only visit the chapel and play a piece for her, her favorite piece in that chapel, Wade in the Water,
I will also speak at IWU MLK program about filling places and spaces with our words, for that is what she did, and that is what we all should do, as she did, as Martin Luther King, Jr., did, because if not, if we do not fill places and spaces with our voices and words, why are we alive?
