Today would have been your 44th birthday. For Papa Xande’s birthday a few weeks ago, the first since he crossed over, I spent the day dancing to Frank Sinatra and eating his favorite ice cream since I no longer consume his other favorite thing, alcohol. It felt like a perfect, personal, and portable ritual I could keep for the future. With your birthday, I couldn’t land on a plan. I had lofty ideas, simple ideas, ideas with people, and solo ideas. Ultimately, my work schedule got in the way of what I half-planned in a suspiciously convenient way. For most of the last 12 months, whenever joyful things happen, they make me think of you. All beautiful feelings end in tears. After a while, it stopped feeling like a bait and switch. It feels now like a new language I speak, a new art to being in the world and feeling like you rub up against me in the poignancy of everyday: a sight, a song, a rainy day, a movie, a “we need to talk about Jerrod Carmichael” text I want to send you. More recently, I’m having experiences where you come to mind, and the feeling of love I get is so complete and overwhelmingly good that, for a second, and it is maybe less than a second, I forget the absolute tragedy that you are gone. For that less-than-a-second, I don’t know what I know, and every cell in my body believes you are here. So yeah, sometimes you feel like added weight to every moment, the permanent brokenness of everything beautiful. Other times, you feel like a lightness, a dissipation, a moment of profound relief.
None of this happens predictably or consistently, of course. The grief is an alien getting comfortable inside of me; I just weave my life around it like (we hope) a pearl... I went to the oldest Black church in the city and the oldest A.M.E. congregation in the country. I misread the schedule and when I got there, they had already closed. I sat outside and meditated a bit. I let myself be comforted by being one in a vast number of believers in Black freedom and “the communion of saints.” Then I slowly walked back home, along the river, because the water is always the way. My silence in the liveliness around me and the warm sun on my face felt like the right way to be with you.