I’m feeling deeply connected to death right now. Between the ever growing toil of the corona virus, the state sanction murderers of innocent black folk and the passing of so many people who were close to me. My father was killed by COVID-19. A close friend died of a massive heart attack. A mentor succumbed after a long battle with various illnesses. An artists I admired died unexpectedly. Their life stories are not about police brutality or overtly about structural racism. They are about ways of living, surviving, hustling and, finally, dying. Once you get past fifty the calendar becomes less and less your friend, and more a way to mark how much time you have left. You wonder which of your friends will outlive you and wonder why you outlived others. Not all deaths end in funerals. Some deaths are of a culturally rich era that the world absorbs the best of before moving on from. Several of those deaths are recounted here. A lot of these stories involve music, because it’s what I covered most of my journalist career and the men in that world tend to colorful characters, who live in the over and underworld.
People are multi-faceted and I’d smart enough now to never ever believe you know and understand everything about anybody. Each of us males millions of decisions on a daily basis, decisions that define your character and guide your journey. I’ve never been a fan of the cardboard cut out, sanitized memories of the departed. Because a person has died it doesn’t turn them into a saint or a devil. Most people live within a wide spectrum of behavior. It’s too easy to sanctify and demonize when people are ice burgs. What drives and molds them is largely hidden below the surface in even the most public lives.
So I’m trying to beat witness to the dead by not viewing them as one or two dimensional figures, but in the multiplicity of their complexity. I published a version of the chapter on my father right before he passed on and it ruffled some feathers in my family. But, to his credit, my father was brutally honest with me about his life and, in so doing, allowed me to finally understand him and see him fully.
Everybody is not that comfortable with such an attempt at honesty. But, as a black writer in America, I think it is of paramount importance that our lives be depicted as completely as possible, escaping not just the facile hero/villain dichotomy, but the thug or victim narrative of popular culture. Between heaven and hell is this reality and in it most people toggle between desire, ambition, love, despair, insecurity, confusion, satisfaction and more as we move reluctantly towards that end point we call death.
The absence of their souls on this plane of existence of palpable. They become our ghost as we are haunted by what they did and said. I remember my father, my friends, my acquaintances, my rivals and those who connected with me for a season. Remembering them is recalling yourself.