In my family, we have a tradition of cooking and sitting with the grieving, especially when they have no words. Especially when the tears have been ripped out and the well to produce more has disappeared. We honor the lives of the folks who’ve been lost, beaten, and violently shredded from this world by sitting and taking care of each other.
But lately, the ways we grieve seem overridden with ownership, policing, and laying claim to. We have gotten away from gifting the grieving privacy, of respecting a life who has passed on, regardless of the circumstances of their death. And though I think this is an extension of the violent carcerality whiteness has imposed upon us, I can’t quite find the words or the reasons why we are doing this to each other.
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Even before the coronavirus hit and forced many of us to grieve in isolation, things have felt off. I’m at a point now where I oscillate between grief and being almost griefless, between feeling everything at once and accepting the creep of dejection and cynicism…
Black folks have had to simultaneously push down our grief lest it be seen as an all consuming weakness, while also being forced to arm ourselves with the perception of grieflessness as a means of protection. Still, we are made to display our grief by making it hollow and thus, intelligible to various audiences but especially to those that are rich, white, and male.
For some of us, grief has become a performance, a career starter, an everyday, unholy thing. The demands we place on the grieving scare me. The realities of bodies being left for hours, sometimes days, in streets, fields, makeshift ditches, driveways, corner store floors, cars, couches, abandoned homes, fire escapes, front porches, our mothers’ laps. The expectations and violences we push onto the already dead keep me up at night. It is all too much.
Source: We are no good to the dead, and yet we believe the grieving owe us their tears
