On Fully Confronting Love & the Death of my Parents in 2021

Two days after my mom died in 2015, I texted a friend that I still believed in love. That friend surely thought I was delirious - freshly sunk in the deep depths of a mind-numbing ocean of grief, pining too quickly after the sun-kissed surface of the water that I would not even begin to see again for another five years. There is no rushing love and healing in the face of continuous death.

My dad had passed nine months earlier in the middle of my senior year of high school and now my mom was gone too halfway through my first semester of college. Despite being legally declared an adult recently by the United States government, I still felt like a child and was following what my parents had always told me to do - stay in school.

To be brutally honest, despite whatever my transcript may say, I don’t remember a thing that I learned from that first semester of college. I don’t even really remember living. After five years of building a complex web of therapy memories and vibrant nightmares, the moments now come back in flashes, often coming and going as they please. However, the one thing that has always stuck is the memory of binge-watching How to Get Away With Murder and not grimacing at the images of all of the dead bodies, despite being deeply afraid of my own parents’ empty, cold corpses just weeks and months earlier. Instead, I grimaced when Viola Davis’s character slid her wig off carefully. The transition between straight, pressed hair and natural, fluffy coils natural, reminded me of the smell of burning grease that plagued my nose as I stood in my mom’s dimly lit bedroom doorway every weekday morning, watching her straighten her hair with a hot comb older than me. If I close my eyes and breath nowadays, I can almost hear my dad snoring softly in the corner too. But that semester I refused even attempting at trying to hear him, and hated any reminder of the smell of her. I avoided smell, taste, feeling, and sometimes even breath, wondering how long until I could succumb to death. My body, aching with a profound sense of loss, moved swiftly through the motions and did what it had to do, namely, schoolwork. I grimly joked with friends that I would be haunted by my dad if I took a year off. He had always pushed me forward, and back then I could feel the rough fingertips of a stubborn ghost pushing me forward in the absence of my newly lost will to live.

But the will hadn’t always been absent. As a little girl from a family where the parents didn’t have bachelor’s degrees, I spent much of my life believing that the ivy league school 20 minutes away from my predominantly, working-class African-American neighborhood was never a possibility for me, but I still dreamed of it. My dad once told me that when I was around four and he was driving me to a local federally-subsidized Pre-K program one morning, I told him I would go someday after hearing about how good the university was from a family friend. Conviction thumping in my tiny heart while strapped into a car seat, I imagine that I was sure of it. The day I was accepted, I didn’t think I got in because the speakers of my 14-year-old desktop computer were broken and I had learned from somewhere on the internet that the school played its theme song for virtual letters that contained good news. After a few seconds of skimming, I exploded and pounded up the stairs, yelling my dad’s name. He emerged from his room, the white of his eyes wide in the darkness of our hallway, and when I screamed at him, he was utterly confused. After nearly 18 years of witnessing my fierce girlhood conviction, he didn’t even believe me. How dare he.

“College acceptances don’t come over the internet. That’s a scam”, he said, his voice laced with the deep tremor of a classic mansplain. Acceptance slowly set in over the next few days and he called me “Ivy League” for a week. He died two months and two days later. My last Christmas card from him says “Dear Ivy League (insert generic message here) Love Daddy.”

I clutched that bright green card and read the short message written in his sloppy chicken-scratch over and over on the morning of his funeral. When my mom’s voice drifted into my bedroom, beckoning me to the car, I placed the card on my dresser gently. My eyes met my eyes in the mirror for a brief moment before I ran out the door, floor-length black dress brushing the surface of mahogany hardwood floors.

My dad and I’s favorite movie to watch together was the Jungle Book. When I was little, we would sit patiently in my basement, giggling softly and cuddling until our favorite scene came on. When King Louie and all of his monkey followers appeared on screen, we would erupt in laughter and dance around the room like fools as Mowgli, his friends, and all of the monkeys sang “Oh, oobee doo I wanna be like you. I wanna walk like you, talk like you, too. You’ll see it’s true someone like me can learn to be like you.” When I was little enough, my dad would scoop me up into his arms and my giggles became laced with excited screams. I told the crowd gathered in the church for his funeral over soft giggles and tears that I wanted to be like my dad for the rest of my life. As flawed as he was, he was still such a great dad. I wanted to love like he did. He knew how to be there during the happy moments and the sad. He would glare at me as I started to cry at the end of the movie when Mowgli leaves all of his friends, tell me to stop crying and to not be so sensitive. I’d cry a little more and eventually he would just sit silently and put an arm around me, reaffirming my sensitivity despite nagging me about it persistently for nearly 18 years. I would snuggle into his arm each time and watch as Mowgli leaves all of his animal friends to join humans in the village just outside of the jungle. Each time, Mowgli clad in a small orange tarp surrounded by brown skin, would look over his shoulder towards Baloo and Bagheera and just give a small smile. He then turns around and never looks back (until the sequel we don’t talk about). After 90 minutes and a lifetime of loving a bear and a jaguar, Mowgli just slowly lets go.

The doctors tell me that’s how my mom died. I never saw my mom’s body after her soul departed it. But the emergency medical examiner told me that it was quick. That one breath she was her and the next, she wasn’t. The heart attack came, it hit her, she fell over, and then she was gone. It was incredibly quick and simple.

The doctors called it dying of a broken heart. My mom was 120 pounds, a little over five feet tall, and was definitely one of those people who gets in more than 10,000 steps a day—she walked everywhere because she was afraid of car accidents and never seeing her family again. Even the healthiest person, when under high stress, can go through life-threatening situations silently. During the months after my dad died, my mom never faltered on the outside. She redid the financial aid applications, switched all the bills into her name, threw my graduation, prom, and college-going away parties, and always did it with a smile on her face.

But the truth is - she really missed him. In a therapy session just two weeks ago, in the midst of sobs, I described her death as a loving God’s greatest mercy. To bring death upon a lonely wife quickly whose house had only just been recently filled with laughter and place her in the arms of her love was the universe’s mercy. For five long years, I didn’t let myself talk in-depth about this very often, but my parents really were in love and for five long years, I’ve pined after that love shallowly. Instead of actually confronting the loss of a love so intense that I was blinded both with and without it, I tried to replicate it in Tinder dates, toxic friendships, and throwing myself into false passions during college. I binded myself to school, to work, to every possible distraction from real healing. Instead of thinking about them, I ran from them. Instead of thinking of my real problems, I ran from them. I ran from me. I didn’t want to bind myself to anything real, substantive because I feared losing it again so I stayed sunken in an ocean of grief for five long years.

My parents were bound to one another for 25 years of what the Black American church would call the holiest of matrimonies. My aunt tells me that they were inseparable while they were together, unlike any other married couple that she knew. They did absolutely everything together, other than work together, and for a long time, they even did that together because they worked at the same place. When my dad died, my mom couldn’t bear to live without him and her body knew that. Her blood pressure raised silently but steadily over a 9-month period until one day it just shut down. In her final moments, just before the heart attack hit, she laid there silently in their bed with his pillow just a foot away from her. And when she tried to get up, it hit her and she laid back down and just let go.

I imagine that the purest form of love is just that simple. It’s standing on the edge of the universe, darkness everlasting, and just falling, having faith that some greater force is going to catch you. It’s just laying back down and letting a massive heart attack from months of built-up stress overtake you or letting your small, overly sensitive daughter cry as she watched a small make-believe boy leave his talking bear friend for the 10th time. It doesn’t really make sense at the moment but in the grand scheme of time, after all the tears in your dorm room, hidden panic attacks in the basement of your university’s main library, and going through the depressive state of not fully living that mourning can be, it will. I was a result of strong love and that’s why I’m still here despite all of it. It’s just that simple.

The purest form of love, the love that carved out the curves of my physical body, the love that crafted the fierce spirit of a daring four-year-old and of a young woman who dared to still live, is not easily rushed. And after five long years, I’m finally letting myself fully confront that love. This year, I’m throwing myself into therapy, into keeping up with my mental health medication, and into daring to actually let myself think of my mom and my dad without distraction, into daring to love the ghosts that have always loved me.