Category: Grieving

Posted on

The Incomparable Ms. Cicely Tyson

December 19, 1924 – January 28, 2021.

You were given 96 years on this earth. You lived them all with such great intention, grace, dignity, beauty, and power. I want to learn from you. So that I can live each of my years to come with this kind of intention. One of my earliest memories of you were glimpses of you in Roots, but watching The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as a young Black teen girl is what deeply drew my heart to you. You became 110-year-old ex-enslaved Jane Pittman right before my eyes. You took and honored her story and you gave it to the rest of us, so we would know her. You brought people to life. The gift and function of story captured my heart very early in life and seeing that movie, seeing you act and tell and show one woman’s story so powerfully, sometimes with just the simple gesture of a movement on your face to inflect an emotion or what you didn’t say or do, to hold to the integrity of telling and showing a scene you were in, you did this with excellence. At the core of who we all are as humans, our stories are the connecting bond between us. Our humanity moves between us, through our stories. And you told stories, you gave them life time and time and time and time again, on the big screen, on the little screen, and on stage plays around the world. You are a forever example of #BlackQueenMagic for brown-skinned girls and women to glean from as we show up as our complete and full selves in this world, at the tables we’re invited to and the ones we build for ourselves. Thank you for holding and fighting for our honor, our dignity in the spaces you stepped into. Thank you for what you gave to us. Rest in peace and in the Lord’s great power. You are beloved.

featured photo courtesy of The Emmys.
Posted on

Grief: A Recent Lesson

My journey with grief, a recent lesson: Sometimes it’s a grief for a different season, a future season that we carry. A grief of “when that happens in the future, then I will grieve this more deeply.”

Sometimes it’s a grief that we carry in this moment. A grief that abides. Deeply. Now. Ever-present. A grief that sticks and clings, like honey on your fingers after you close the pouring lid.

And that kind of grief is okay too.

Featured Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.

Posted on

The Good Cry

I feel sometimes you have to be with your process.

For me, that may mean getting a cotton facecloth, sitting down on my bed with my bedroom door closed and letting my emotions connect with my heart and grieve the desires in this heart that continue to live unmet, unfulfilled.

To cry and to lament what I want is not what I have.

And to express my sadness in that.

And the reality that right now, what God has given is what I have.

The tension of where hope and here co-exist together. The reality of the good and the tough tracks of life that we all live on at the same time, no matter the season. The inevitability of what it means to live actively in your waiting. And that this spiritual growth producer that waiting and longsuffering become in you continues with you, in every decade.

What is it about waiting that God deems so necessary for us as His children?

Why does it vex my humanity so?

I want things now but I’m guided to live in light of the yet-to-come.

My heart doesn’t always understand. My mind tries to make things logical, practical, strategic. My tears just know the wait has been long and ‘holding pattern’ feels like the answer that I keep getting.

Lord, I’m listening. Help me to hear the way you are speaking to me.

Modern poet Joekenneth Museau says, “People aren’t taking time to deal with their own issues because there’s always a distraction or something to take you away from what’s going on inside.”

I can feel things that need to be expressed in me before the words come. The tears are my indicators. I give them their propers. And respectfully move my logic and thinking to the backseat of myself and allow my emotions to drive me for as long as the good cry is needed, as long as it takes to truly out get it out.

I cry. I pause. I breathe. I cry again. Repeating this cycle, blowing my nose into that facecloth, embracing what the tears are helping me to do: deal with my life and what I’m feeling and what those feelings want to tell me.

Sadness isn’t bad. It’s a feeling just as joy is. I want to make space for my sadness. And to give my tears room to breathe.

Photo by JD Mason on Unsplash.
Posted on

Nia

I think of her and my breath still gets taken away. What if 21 years ago I was walking somewhere with people I love and a random stranger, a white male recently released on parole, ran up to me unprovoked and stabbed me in the neck and stabbed my loved one and then ran away? 21 years of my life as a black young woman would have ceased to exist. Because everything after that heinous moment would not have been. Every laugh that tickled up my vocal chords into the ears of those who love me, every new birthday, every moment growing more into this brown skin, every tear shed through struggles that made these melanin muscles stronger, every breath given from God that gave me more footing to see this world and love and discover Him deeply. Everything would have stopped at 18. It’s not fair that everything has stopped at 18 for her. It’s not fair, it’s not right, and I’m numb at times understanding and living out what it means to be a black woman in America…and the intersectionality that comes with it.

Nia, I remember you, little sister. I remember you. I want this to be made right. I want this to be better. #NiaWilson #sayhername

Posted on

Finding Me Truth #10: The Unexpected

Growing, learning, grieving

Amazing how years after a loss, the grief can still be so debilitating & quite unexpected.

Reflecting and grateful for the pain.

It means I have loved.

“Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.” ― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior: A Memoir