“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
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But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke

As a long-time Shirley Jackson fan, I was eager to binge the new Netflix show based on her book, The Haunting of Hill House. While I don’t love slasher films, give me anything in a creepy old house. The Shining wouldn’t be what it is without the Overlook Hotel. Settling in to watch, I expected to feel the usual emotions you feel viewing something scary—dread, fright, perhaps revulsion. But suddenly I felt an emotion wash over me that took me by surprise: anger. Anger over watching a character being forced to view the embalmed body of a loved one.

Told over a series of ten episodes, the visually stunning show is a reimagining of Jackson’s story, rather than a direct adaptation. Jackson’s group of strangers meeting in Hill House to take part in a paranormal study are now a nuclear family, the Cranes. Olivia and Hugh Crane purchase Hill House with the intention of remodeling it over the summer, then flipping it for a fortune so that they can build their “Forever House” for their family of five children. Hill House has other ideas however.

The Cranes are haunted not only by their experiences that summer, but by the lasting devastation of grief. Director Mike Flanagan tells their tale in present time mixed with flashbacks that reveal how they became the fractured adults that they are. The show has received mainly positive critical reviews, and is currently the most popular user rated Netflix series.

Living a life damaged by grief is something I understand well. When I was eleven, my sister died. I usually just tell people that she died in a car accident, which is sort of true, but really, she drowned. It happened in Colorado, during the spring thaw when the melting snow on the mountain peaks turns peaceful, meandering rivers into dark, raging torrents.

Living in a tiny coal mining town, restaurants and teen-age entertainments were both in small supply, so one April evening, she and a few friends decided to drive a few towns away for pizza. The driver lost control of the car, and in the mountains, when that happens, you either drive into the side of the mountain or you plunge off the other side, over a cliff. He swerved to the cliff-plunging side that had a spring-swollen river at the bottom. I don’t know if my sister drowned in the car or was thrown from the car into the river. I suppose it doesn’t really matter—the outcome was the same. She was seventeen.

In the Netflix series, Shirley (Crane sibling #2) is a mortician, running her own funeral home with her husband as the business manager. In the first episode, we see her counselling a child named Max, who does not want to view his dead grandmother lying in her coffin. Max has been seeing the ghost of his grandmother at night, who shows more signs of decay with each visitation. Shirley tells Max that viewing the open casket of his grandmother will give him the opportunity to say goodbye, to have closure. Shirley tells him that she has “fix[ed] her, that’s what I do.” She will “look just like you remember her — just like she’s supposed to.”

These reassurances do not work on Max, as we see in episode 2. At the funeral, Max is still firm in his resolve to not view the open casket. “I don’t want to,” he insists. But for some reason, he must look. Shirley tells him, “If you don’t, you’ll be upset later. I promise. This is a good thing, and you’re a good boy.”

We don’t learn if Max does view Grandma or not, but most likely he was forced to do so. The show at this point flashes back to Shirley as a child, at a funeral, unwilling to view her mother’s corpse. Young Shirley gives in, and is amazed at how her mother looks lying against the satin. “You fixed her,” she says to the funeral director, highlighting the seminal moment to her becoming a mortician. (Likely the kittens and her need to control played a role as well).

Watching these scenes with Max resurged feelings of frustration and anger that I thought I had long let go of. Why won’t anyone listen to him? Why does he have to see his Grandmother’s dead body? Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?

Like Max, I was very certain that I did not want to see my sister lying in a coffin. I did not want that to be my final image of her. Like Max, none of the adults around me listened to me either, believing that they knew what was best for me. “You need to say goodbye to your sister. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” “She’ll just look like she’s sleeping.” “It’ll be okay.”

Unlike the dramatic, stylish gloom of Shirley’s funeral parlor, the one in which my sister’s casket was displayed had bright white walls, her burgundy carpeting, gold detailing, and multiple blinding flood lights; there was nary a shadowy nook to be found. No spaces for lurking specters. No place to hide from well-intentioned spectators. Bouquets and wreaths of flowers lined either side of the room. The peppery scent of lilies was so thick, you could taste it; to this day, I am triggered by their smell.

Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?
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While I wasn’t physically dragged to the coffin, and absent of support from any adult, the continual emotional pressure eventually broke down my defenses. I finally was a “good girl” and went to see how the mortician “fixed” my sister.

She lay on white satin, in a white dress. You might have thought she was sleeping, if you viewed her from a distance. But up close, no amount of pancake base or pink blush could cover the green and purple bruises. She was swollen, caused either by drowning or embalming. The glue used to keep her eyes shut was visible. Her face was in a grimace, and nothing about her looked peaceful.

As I stood beside her, the hope that it was all a horrible practical joke and she might sit up — alive — all dissolved when I clasped her folded hands. Hands that had brushed my hair a thousand times, turned the beloved pages of hundreds of books, and caught lizards just to make me laugh, were now the icy hands of mannequin.

As my delusion shattered, a fellow mourner came up beside me and said, “Oh, look at her! She looks like a sleeping angel.” Unable to face such obvious posturing and lies, I ran outside to wait on the steps until it was time to drive to the cemetery. I didn’t say goodbye, because she was neither there nor gone for me.

The act of burial — placing a dead person in the ground with intention — is indisputably traced back 100,000 years to a group burial in Israel and possibly goes back 250,000 years, to a Homo naledi find in South Africa. Paleoanthropologist Paige Madison describes the desire to bury the dead as a part of the human ability to think in the abstract:

“Humans use symbols to communicate and convey these abstract thoughts and ideas. We imbue non-practical things with meaning. Art and jewelry, for example, communicate concepts about beliefs, values, and social status. Mortuary rituals, too, have been put forward as a key example of symbolic thought, with the idea that deliberate treatment of the dead represents a whole web of ideas. Mourning the dead involves remembering the past and imagining a future in which we too will die.”

As humans began creating more complex living arrangements, so too, did the rituals surrounding burial become more elaborate. It’s difficult to tell if the earliest burials were secular or involved any spiritual meaning, but soon, funeral rites took on a religious element, typically involving a belief in an afterlife. The development of social hierarchy also played a role in the development of how we bury our dead. The higher up the social ladder, the more elaborate and costly the service.

The specific traditions widely vary, across time and cultures. Since the Civil War, embalming and underground interment within a coffin has been the traditional burial practice in the United States. While embalming does delay decomposition, the notion that viewing the body somehow helps with the grieving process is not scientific, as noted by investigative journalist Jessica Mitford in her exposé, The American Way of Death. Rather, it’s a justification put forward by those who have a financial stake in encouraging embalming: the funeral industry.

As an adult, I took a class on grief. Part of the course work was a field trip to a funeral parlor. It was a large blue Victorian house that had been converted to part living space and part business, much like Shirley’s set up on the show. Keeping with the Victorian architecture, the interior decoration was heavy wood, silk-lined walls, and sumptuous fabrics of deep peacock-blue. The air was vanilla scented. It could have been an upscale bed and breakfast.

Our tour guide was tiny, with a sleek business bob and black-framed glasses. She was a recent graduate, joining the family business right out of college. “Third generation mortician!” she chirped. “I know I look really young, but I’ve been around this business my whole life. A lot of morticians are multigenerational. I guess we like to keep it in the family.” She was “passionate about helping people in their worst time.” After touring the viewing room, the coffin showroom, and business offices, we trooped downstairs to see the embalming rooms.

Walking down the narrow stairs, I began feeling the short breath, racing heart and sweatiness of a panic attack, knowing I wouldn’t like what I was about to learn. The pull to know what had been done to my sister was stronger and I kept going, doing calming breathing techniques. Downstairs was completely different world than above. Hospital doors, Dijon mustard-colored walls, dim fluorescent lighting, and cement floors. Odd chemical smells, plus something undefinable replaced the vanilla. It felt cold. And here? There were dark corners.

The embalming room looked much like it did in The Haunting of Hill House, except I remember more hoses and sprayers hanging from the ceiling. When I learned about all the draining, and injecting, and filling, I felt a screamless horror. I viscerally knew that my sister would not have wanted any of that done to her body. A body that she was so meticulous in maintaining. Not only was her death violent, but it felt like she had been further violated, after death.

Seeped in a commercialism that has largely removed meaningful ritual from burial rites, the funeral industry in the United States rakes in many billions of dollars each year. With the cost of cremation being many thousands of dollars less than embalming, funeral homes have a vested interest in steering their clientele in the direction of chemical preservation. Still, the number of people choosing cremation in the U.S. continues to rise.

According to the Cremation Association of North America’s 2017 industry statistics, the number of people cremated vs embalmed was 51.6%. Reasons behind the growth are varied, from cost to decreased religious stigma against it (the Catholic Church opposed cremation until 1963). Concern for the environment is shaping people’s choices as well, with the growing awareness of the toxicity of embalming chemicals leaching into the soil and water.

I’ve chosen cremation for myself because I don’t want anyone I love forced to see my death face; I want them to only recall how I looked alive.

My mother and I have only talked about this issue once, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t recall who brought it up, or how or why we discussed it. What I do remember is that I wanted her to know I was angry over being forced to view the open casket. I wanted — at least — an acknowledgement that my autonomy had been overlooked, that maybe a mistake had been made.

“I told you then that I didn’t want to see her, and now I’ve had to live with that image of her dead stuck in my mind since then. No one would listen to me!”

“I just had to see her one more time.”

“Then why couldn’t you look at her back in a private room? Instead of demanding that everyone see her? That I see her?” My resentment was like a pin popping a balloon; my mother’s entire body deflated. Looking at the ground, she mumbled, “I don’t know. I just couldn’t think really about anything at the time.”

In that moment, she seemed so tiny and fragile—something I could either choose to set carefully down or hurl at the floor, smashing to bits. Witnessing her hurt, I felt ashamed for only focusing on myself, and decided to let the anger go. I thought I had until it flared up while watching The Haunting of Hill House.

While the final episode is the one most negatively reviewed, I believe it gets it right. In order to move past grief — at least enough to heal and learn to live on — the raw honesty that comes from a moral inventory is needed. I’ve never wavered in my certainty that seeing my sister in her coffin was not right for me. I still wish one person had listened, and helped me, rather than being coerced into what other people thought would bring me closure.

However, I did need to let go of my anger, because I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted in my mother’s situation. The possibility that I might find out is my own Bent Neck Lady. I don’t fear my own death, but I am afraid that I will know the nightmare of burying my child, that I will have to make the impossible decision: embalming or cremation?

And does either choice really matter? Death’s outcome is the same.

Several years ago my father died suddenly on my first day of vacation. I had been working over 60 hours a week for a non-profit for three years. I was regularly told I was an incredible employee, often going far above and beyond what was expected of me. I had just been promoted.

A week after my father died I returned to work. I was in shock, I had just barely begun to grieve. I was tired and I managed my pain badly. I began having panic attacks. I desperately needed a break. A month later I asked if there was any way I could have another few days of vacation, as I’d spent my previous vacation planning his sudden memorial and was emotionally and physically exhausted. I was told no. I trudged along, worked ridiculous hours, didn’t have the time or energy to process my grief. Eventually, I was fired. I was told I had become too inattentive, made too many mistakes.

I told myself I was lucky I didn’t yet have a family to feed. I was lucky to qualify for unemployment, which just barely allowed me to eat and live while I continued to grieve and look for work. Not everyone is so lucky.

There are no laws in the United States protecting workers who are grieving. In the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act there is no specific, mandated provision for bereavement leave. And while the FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) requires certain employers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid family and medical leave to eligible employees, this is only unpaid leave, and the only employees eligible are those who work for private employers with 50 or more employees for each working day during each of 20 or more weeks in the current or preceding year.

So if you work for a company of 45 people, you aren’t even covered for unpaid leave. If your company has 1,000 people for almost four months out of the year, you are not covered. If you are a part-time employee, you are not covered. To deal with this gap, a lot of companies have their own policies when it comes to grief. And a lot don’t.

I trudged along, worked ridiculous hours, didn't have the time or energy to process my grief. Eventually, I was fired.
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Although most professionals recognize that grief is trauma that can affect people physically as well as emotionally, employers often don’t take this into account while making policies regarding leave. This is common when it comes to death, as if we are afraid we will speak it into existence, death is an experience that we do not address until it is absolutely necessary. Even then it is in hushed tones, and in the U.S. it is like we are embarrassed by our grief. The irony of course is that it is an experience we are all guaranteed to have. We will all lose those important to us. We will all die.

Just as employees should be expected to take time off to recover from the physical trauma of surgery, employees must be given time to heal from the very real trauma that is grief. But instead, people return to work, like I did, distracted with the pain of losing someone, lacking sleep from planning memorials, lacking money from unexpected travel, in desperate need of rest. It is not ok that we have to be financially well off to have time to grieve. You shouldn’t have to earn time to heal.

We are not all affected equally by this injustice. A complete lack of grieving time in non-salaried positions disproportionately affects Women, PoC, and poor people, and especially those who find themselves at the intersection of all three oppressed groups.

Just as wages are not equal for everyone, the same is true when it comes to benefits. Part time employees rarely get paid leave, and when they do it is short compared to how long it takes for most to heal from the trauma of death, which according to most experts is at least 3 months to a year or more to begin to feel some semblance of normality. About 59% of all wage and salary workers in the United States are paid an hourly rate. This means that almost 60% of our employed citizens aren’t legally required to have unpaid leave right off the bat. And most families can’t afford a period of a provider not getting paid anyway.

The irony of course is that it is an experience we are all guaranteed to have. We will all lose those important to us. We will all die.
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41 million people in the U.S. live in poverty. When you are living check to check, you cannot afford to miss work for more than a funeral, if that. But a funeral does not adequately prepare someone for life without a spouse, or for the depression that can follow a parent dying. Simply put, it isn’t enough. Merely taking the time to grieve can pull families even deeper into poverty.

What happens when you already live below the poverty level and someone close to you, like your partner, dies? Not only are you suddenly missing your partner’s income, you are expected to continue to work to earn your own income like nothing has happened. The average lifespan is about five years longer for women than men in the U.S., and about seven years longer worldwide. Statistically it is likely women will experience the death of a man close to them in their lifetimes. If a woman relies on that man for income, she can now left on her own to fend financially.

Women, especially women of color, are more affected by a lack of bereavement leave, as they are more likely to be single heads of households with children. It is no longer the case that almost all houses are relying on a man’s income. In 2015, 42% of all households with children under 18 had a woman earning most or all of the household income. More than 80% of Black mothers bring in 40% or more of their families’ income. And yet there are almost double the number of women in the United States working part time as men. This means that women are disproportionately affected not only by less income but also by a lack of benefits, including bereavement leave.

Oppression happens in a number of ways. Not giving people time to heal from trauma means they must fight for a way forward through other oppressive systems with the extra burden of being hurt. Black people are 13% of the U.S. population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

Not only is there a clear wage gap based on race, it has been found that this gap follows employees from position to position. Because a WoC made less at her last three positions, she will make less at her current position. Pairing this with the likelihood she does not have benefits including bereavement leave, and you have systemic oppression that can affect a family, and generations to come.

It benefits everyone to have bereavement leave. When employees are fully rested and supported, productivity goes up. Employees are less likely to quit their jobs when given adequate vacations and sick time. This is true for most benefits. Additionally, it costs money to hire a new employee. Nurturing and adding to your current employee’s skillset with new training is much less expensive than utilizing your HR department to conduct interviews, hire someone new, and train that new employee all the while covering an empty position. Allowing employees time they deserve to heal ultimately costs less.

Not giving people time to heal from trauma means they must fight for a way forward through other oppressive systems with the extra burden of being hurt.
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Bereavement leave can be done well. In Sweden, every employee can have up to ten days of paid bereavement leave a year. In Canada, “When a member of an employee’s immediate family dies, the employee is entitled to leave on any normal working day that falls within the three-day period immediately following the day the death occurred.” As long as the employee has been continuously employed for three months, they are also eligible to be paid for the days they are out, up to three days.

Everyone dies. Everyone experiences the death of loved ones at some point in their lives. Our fear is doing us a disservice. We are underprepared for the inevitable. We must have systems in place to allow for necessary healing. We must have policies that make leave available for workers who are mourning, because it affects us all. A lack of bereavement leave is oppression and it must be addressed.

“A large number of black women writers, both past and present, have gone to early graves. To know their life stories is to be made aware of how death hovers . . . [their deaths] stand as constant reminders that life is not promised — that it is crucial for a writer to respect time.”

By Stephanie Fields

There is a bittersweet feeling I have when experiencing Solange’s masterful album, A Seat at the Table. It’s a mixture of pride and sorrow that swells when I listen to the melancholic melodies and absorb the colorful abstract visuals. Solange has delivered a thoroughly crafted, uncomfortably truthful, and hauntingly vulnerable account of what it is to be black in the world. It’s an internal journey through grief, anger, doubt, and hopelessness — notable not just for causing listeners to wonder how pain can sound so beautiful, but for the amount of time she took to complete it.

Solange reported after her album’s release that it took four years to finish her work. Such a lengthy timeline is in stark contrast to those historically afforded to black women creators. Master playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s entire career, for example, was over in just five short years.

Time has always been something of great fascination, famously described as a social construct, a portal through which one can travel, a luxury often afforded to the rich and privileged. But for black women creatives, time has proven to be a parasitic poison that has long stolen many of our beloved writers far too early. In her collection of essays on the writer at work, Remembered Rapture, bell hooks speaks of time’s insidious treatment of black women writers:

Put bluntly: Black women creatives have not been able to afford to trifle with time. For them, it is a literal tumor that eats away at their lives. Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Pat Parker, Claudia Tate, Minnie Riperton, Lorraine Hansberry, Kathleen Collins have all died pretty much the same way: fairly young, of cancer, and on the cusp of burgeoning creativity.

It’s a scary pattern, especially when you are, as I am, a black woman creative fighting tooth and nail to get work out. I’ve always been plagued by the question, why. Why did all of these brilliant women go out the same way, at the hands of such a brutal killer?

Womanist writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins provided a theory on the matter. Before her own death, she stated that it was fear that caused talented creative women to fall into a self-destructive illnesses she termed as “psychic disconnection[s].” This fear was rooted in women feeling their creative power but not being able to acknowledge and manifest it.

But what stops these women from being able to acknowledge and manifest their creative power? Is it solely feelings of imposter syndrome? The result of white-supremacist patriarchal structures that incapacitate them from accessing the tools to fully step into and realize the extent of their creativity, their genius? Collins certainly faced massive hardships. Before she could make her first film at 37 — she would die just nine years later — she tried securing funding for a screenplay and was met with such fierce resistance, it left her with a deep feeling of “discouragement,” to which she stated: “Forget it, I’ll never be able to make a film; I might as well do something else with my life.”

The denial of access to the tools to actualize a dream is criminal, yet prevalent in the experiences of black women attempting to do creative work. Their desire to create is challenged and often extinguished by deep discouragement at the hands of racist, sexist structures in creative fields and beyond. Is it having to stare down such defeat that allows fear to grow into the illness that robs these women of time? Or is it the dedication to persist beyond such racist sexist structures, such lack of power, and create anyway that requires the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life?

Eventually, Collins began making films — which required a fierce dedication, but also yielded mild success that arrived at the time of her first bout with cancer. Such was the same with the woman whom she drew great inspiration from, Lorraine Hansberry. The prolific playwright and critic died five years after she made history as the first black woman to write a stage play produced on Broadway. Was it fear that shortened Hansberry’s window? Or was it dedication?

Contrary to Collins’ theory on Hansberry’s death — a theory that eerily prophesied her own fate — James Baldwin believed Hansberry’s dedication to persist in her creative efforts was the culprit behind her early death. In “Sweet Lorraine,” the forward to Hansberry’s posthumously published book, To Be Young Gifted And Black, Baldwin writes:

“Perhaps it is just as well, after all,that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly with the inward one. And it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man.”

Baldwin and Collins make a similar observation of timing in regards to Hansberry’s work and her illness. They both agree that she was ahead of her time, but differ in their interpretations of how she dealt with both time and illness. In Collins’ view, there was an element of fear that ate Hansberry up; in Baldwin’s, it was a fierce dedication. Are fear and dedication, then, mutually exclusive? Does one trump the other? Do either affect the amount of time black women are given to create?

In A Seat at the Table, we hear both Baldwin’s and Collins’ theories play out in a complex melee. Solange is not just providing anthems for us to sing in defense when outsiders try to touch our hair, or tell us not to bite the hand that feeds us, or that they should be able to use a word we’ve spent generations painfully reclaiming. She is not just providing an oration of her own family history, a history of Louisiana, or a man’s entrepreneurial accomplishments. Despite the beautiful melodies, and trance-like beats, the lyrics hold a weight that reveals Solange’s internal burden, which she’s carried while navigating through her sense of brokenness, grief, and fear in order to complete such an ambitious piece of work.

“I felt so many got to create my narrative and all I wanted to tell my story, our story, in my own words, and in my own voice.”

The same desire that propelled women like Collins, Hansberry, Lorde, and more is mirrored in Solange — and so are the struggles. Solange spoke about the need to maintain resources in order to complete her album and provide for her family. Her struggle speaks to the plurality of responsibility black women have had to face all while creating work. Beyond resisting the racist, sexist structures that attempt to defer their dreams, black women creators are also mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and friends, all identities that carry their own individual responsibilities. On top of being someone’s mother, lover, and friend, black women are also balancing jobs in order to fund those for whom they care as well as for their own livelihood.

They do all of this while trying to not only feel their creative power and genius, but to manifest it. Collins likened the experience of trying to complete her first film while caring for her children to “going down a terribly long tunnel. It was frightening . . . ” So often are black women’s duties hyphenated between meeting the needs of loved ones and trying to reconcile their own personal desires, this pressure is enough to give rise to the fear of one’s capacity to realize one’s full creative genius.

Such dichotomies of duty to one’s family and one’s desires and the resulting grief, fear, and desolation that occur are also reflected in two of Solange’s darkest songs: “Weary” and “Cranes in the Sky.” In one song she is succumbing to that dark space of grief and doubt when she laments her weariness of finding her place in the world and retreats into herself, her exhaustion, her internal struggles, in order to find her body, her glory:

Be leery ‘bout your place in the world

You’re feeling like you’re chasing the world

You’re leaving not a trace in the world

But you’re facing the world

In the other, she is trying to live, to create beyond the looming darkness hanging over her like cranes. She speaks of the ways she’s tried to evade it, to overcome it — with money, with fashion, with frivolity, with isolation:

I tried to let go my lover

Thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover

Even today’s most wonderfully anomalous filmmaker, Ava DuVernay, with her accomplishments of having directed an Academy Award-winning film and being the first woman to direct a $100 million movie, cannot escape the dark reality of shrinking time for the black woman creative. She recently spoke with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah about the pressure and anxiety time imposes on black women creatives:

“I feel like I have to make the most of this time, because there’s not anyone I can look to who’s had a long window who’s a woman, period. A black person, period . . . So for me it feels like a window that could close at any time. It doesn’t feel fast like, ‘Wow, this happened fast.’ It feels fast like, ‘Better get it in.’ Before it closes.”

Thirty-four years ago, Collins found herself in a similar position as she was the premiere black woman to write, direct, and produce a feature film. But she had no one to look to for guidance, no one who had lit a path before her, no one to encourage her that she could reach the zenith of her potential. Perhaps that was the cause of her fear, perhaps that’s what led to a dark time of discouragement, perhaps that’s what shortened the time of all of the women who followed Collins; they were firsts in their own rights, painstakingly carving out trails for the women after them to blaze. Such dedication required the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.

Solange taking her time to create a sole album is a, however inadvertent, subversive response to time’s maleficent treatment of black women creatives. Though she was faced with similar feelings of doubt, a lack of resources, and extra responsibilities, the privilege she had to create without a sense of urgency, without an illness lurking over her shoulder, without time threatening to snatch her life away, was bought and paid for by the sacrifices of the black women writers before her. Solange’s process exists as an anomaly, an exception to a terrifying rule we are reminded of as we grieve the recent and far too early death of Gloria Naylor.

This is where Solange and Collins diverge. Collins existed without a predecessor, while Solange has a varied assortment of examples from whom she can pull. The same goes for me. These women, and their lives, exist as more than omens; they are inspirations that fuel my dedication when I want to succumb to fear. They lift me up when I hear the echoing of the clock ticking, of doubt telling me I can’t do something. They remind me to create with a fervency, and whatever time I can afford to take a reprieve or to even go further into my own potential has been bought and paid for by the blood, sweat, tears, fears, and dedications of the women before me.

Perhaps Solange found a similar comfort in the fact that these women had done it, pulled off the creation of such ambitious work. Perhaps it served as reassurance that she could go into the depths of her soul and pull out something as magnificent as A Seat at the Table. The fact that she emerged from those depths healthy and able to live long enough to see the fruit of such labor is, indeed, a cause for celebration.

***

I grew up against the sprawling backdrop of the cornfields, in a college town 75 miles west of Chicago. Despite my physical disability, my father made sure that I had a normal childhood — the kind that feels like the perfect home movie when you look back years later as an adult. We chased lightning bugs in the summer and sledded down snow hills in the winter.

Life was simple.

And then my father was diagnosed with sinus cancer and died by suicide about a month after finishing treatment. After that, things weren’t so simple anymore.

People talk about all the things that happened before the suicide . . . what led to it, the warning signs, etc. But what about what happens after? The devastation. The people who are left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of a life they thought they knew. A life they know, down to the very core of their being, will never be the same. Ever again.

How are we supposed to cope? How can survivors even begin to make sense of all the pain and confusion? That gnawing, sinking feeling in your heart? It just won’t go away. Where’s the instruction manual for navigating this dark, unfriendly terrain?

My father’s death wasn’t pretty. His death was ugly, the kind of ugly that makes you just want to run away. It’s the kind of ugly so dark and unimaginable, you never see it coming. The kind that can make you feel like you’ll be lost forever in a sea of grief. It renders you powerless as its tide pulls you out farther and farther, and you begin to wonder if you’ll ever make it back alive.

How are we supposed to cope? How can survivors even begin to make sense of all the pain and confusion? That gnawing, sinking feeling in your heart?
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There were no final days spent sitting by his bedside, where we all were able to say everything we wanted to say to each other. There was no comforting hospice care. Those loose ends left dangling at the end of every life? They weren’t neatly tied up in a pretty box with a bow on top; in fact, many of those loose ends are still dangling more than a decade later, whipping around wildly in the air.

He got to say all his goodbyes in a letter he left us. We didn’t. He got his “closure.” We didn’t. Instead, he left us with open, gaping wounds. People say that with suicide, a letter is helpful. They say that the survivors who get one are lucky, as not everyone leaves their words behind. But my father’s letter just painted a confusing portrait of a man who, it turns out, I didn’t even know — a portrait of a man who wasn’t my father.

His letter left me with more questions than answers, in the end.

More consuming than even my father’s actual death, I’ve come to realize, is processing the way he died. No one wants to feel like their loved one would rather leave than stay; it’s the ultimate heartbreak, the kind that bears down on your shoulders, leaving you unable to breathe. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he wasn’t supposed to die like that. The superhero doesn’t give up halfway through the movie — he gets up and keeps fighting. Our story, at least the chapters with him, were not supposed to end this way.

Since my father’s death, some friends and family haven’t talked much about him. It’s either because they don’t know what to say, don’t want to upset us, or, perhaps, it’s just too painful for them. But this denial, their failure to speak of him, is something I struggle to accept. How can someone be such an important part of your life and then just vanish from it? People act like my father never existed at all. Sometimes I just want to scream, “CAN’T YOU SEE IT?? HE’S STILL HERE!”

And he is here — in everything I do, in all my little quirks that remind me of him, in my red hair that he passed down to me.

More consuming than even my father’s actual death, I’ve come to realize, is processing the way he died.
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Memories are my way of keeping my father alive. They make the past feel within reach again, a necessary comfort when you feel like your life now and your life with your loved one are two completely separate existences.

The word “suicide” is like a black hole of sorts. It’s expansive, never-ending, and dark; no matter how much you talk about it, there’s always more to say. Always. I wish I could say that I know no one can relate, but unfortunately, I know far too many of you can. Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States. We are, in fact, in the middle of an epidemic, with suicide rates at a 30-year high.

So I know that many of you are grappling with what to say, trying to find the words to comfort a family member, a friend — possibly even yourself. It’s been 13 years since my father’s suicide, and I still fumble, every single day, to find the right words. So today, I will write them. Not just for my father. But for me and for you — and for the millions who live with the effect of suicide every day.

Suicide changes you forever.

The idea that a loved one died so unexpectedly and so violently shakes you to the very core of your being, and as much as you may wish to deny it, you’ll never be the same person ever again. I never really understood this until I grieved my father. Slowly, however, I realized that not only was I grieving my father’s death, but I was also grieving the loss of my “old life.”

I think, in the end, the real journey I’m on is learning to say goodbye to my old life, not just learning how to say goodbye to my father. It’s important to remember that sometimes, I — you, we — need to try saying hello to our new lives, if just to see how it feels.

And please, please continue to talk about your loved one. Whether you’re angry or sad or reminiscing about happier times, it’s important to keep your loved one with you. Keeping quiet is akin to letting the suicide win. Don’t let it. You owe it to your loved one — and most importantly, you owe it to yourself.

For the group of us who knows so intimately that life will never be the same, my heart is with you.