Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?

The morning my mother died was cold and dark, and the snow fall outside was frenzied and piling high. I’d put my headphones on in the night to block out the loud hiss and moan of my mother’s oxygen machine. I was tired. Less than six months after founding the Youth Media Council, which would later become the organization MediaJustice, doctors told my sister and me that sickle cell anemia, a fatal genetic blood disorder, was finally and actively taking my mother’s life. For three years following the end-stage diagnosis I flew home from Oakland to Brooklyn for one week every month to relieve my sister of caregiving duties.

As I stood above my mother’s deathbed, her body curved like a crescent moon, my hands a sickled semi-circle around her, a feeling of abject failure gurgled in my throat. I couldn’t swallow it. I couldn’t spit it out.

My mom, a single mother and a leader in the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, had passed to me all of my politics and seeded in me all the things that I am, good and bad. My mother stood for me when no one else did, and she died while I slept. On my watch. That guilt, the incongruence between working daily to heal the world but being unable to save my mother’s life, was powered by the illusion of my control over life and death — an entire worldview centered on my failure.

I had already helped seed a half dozen groups and even more ideas. I was one of the leaders diversifying and forging an emerging media justice sector. I was making the kind of difference I had always wanted to make. I could coordinate campaigns and build communities, I could navigate wins and losses with order, plans, brains. That’s what I thought. I could control this. 

Instead of surrendering to grief ​’s momentum, I backed away from it with everything I had. I continued to run away for the next five years. I ran into nicotine, into alcohol, into sex. I ran into drama and conflict. But more than anything, more than everything, I ran headfirst into my job. I worked all through the night, at bars and at conferences. Everywhere, all the time.

During those first five years after my mother’s death, I entered what poets and psychologists alike have dubbed the ​“dark night of the soul,” a stage in personal development when a person undergoes a difficult and significant transition, and the previous frameworks like identity, relationship, career, habit or a belief system that previously gave life meaning no longer do. Author and grief activist Francis Weller suggests that while this dark night can often look like depression, it is actually the deformation of personality that occurs when oppression forces individuals, communities and generations to carry grief as a solitary burden. He says ​“the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation.” Whether the message is coming from the nation-state, your employer, or family and friends, when the message is ​“Get over it. Get back to work,” people frequently try to numb themselves to cope with the discomfort of loss and the feelings of extreme deprivation and isolation that can follow.

As is the way with major loss, my mother’s death hallowed me, knocked me to my knees and emptied me until there was nothing left but holy ground. It was in that tender and sacred state that I reconnected with Alana Devich, the queer Black femme from my college alma mater who would become my best friend, then my soulmate and then my wife. Alana’s quiet, stubborn quirk was a kind of genius to me. It made her the most insightful and wittiest person I had ever met. Her kindness was threaded through with a streak of melancholy, a freshly tendered gratitude that saw and delighted in everything, even me. Especially me. It may be the reason that when I put my cheek on her cheek and asked her to marry me, she didn’t hesitate. She said yes. Even when I asked her again and again. She said yes and I was ready. I was certain the world had already taken from me all it was going to take. Loss had ravaged me, but it had not won.

The year after our wedding was a blissful one. We traveled. Made plans to move from our junior one-bedroom to a larger place with room for our future. We talked about buying a house. So it was a heartwrenching shock when an oncologist walked into the office where we sat, arms around each other, and diagnosed Alana with an incurable end-stage gastroesophageal cancer that had already invaded her liver, lungs, esophagus, bones. Alana said she wanted to fight, and, oh, we did. As we worked our way through crisis after crisis, through 12 rounds of 56-hour chemotherapy infusions, weekly IV hydration, frequent emergency hospitalizations, surgery and rehab, I continued to work as executive director of Media Justice. Fundraising. Staff meetings. Human relations. Strategic campaigns. It almost broke me. My wife, of whom I will forever be in constant awe, fought an exhaustive two-year battle against a painful, disabling and debilitating cancer. Alana Devich Cyril, a woman who brought me closest to my truest self, also brought me face-to-face with sacred death. She died peacefully at the young age of 42 in my arms, at home.

I’d spent the five years after my mother’s death becoming a driven and overworked executive movement leader. I tried desperately to fill the hollow grief had carved into my life by seeking familial connections with co-workers, bonding over our shared history of trauma and loss. I joined the community that would become the somatic transformation group Generative Somatics and, over a decade, off and on, founder Staci Haines and others taught me practices that ultimately helped me integrate my traumatic loss. In those years, I led my organization to win national campaigns that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I helped to build a new media justice and digital rights social justice sector. At times, I did so in ways that didn’t center the dignity in myself and others. I learned the hard-won lesson that grief demands its due, and it will take by force what is not freely given.

But this journey through what experts call ​“complicated grief,” in which the bereaved person experiences debilitating feelings of extreme loss that don’t improve or integrate over time, is what revealed to me this truth: that in order to give my heart to love and my hands to freedom movements, I had to first understand and attend to grief.

***

My mother’s death wasn’t my first major loss, it just had the greatest impact. By the time I was 30, I had an intimate relationship with death and dying. I had grown up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn in the 1980s, when Black bodies were felled like great trees, cut down by bullets, by intimate violence, by accidents and disease. I knew death, but I did not recognize the grief sitting, unmoving, in my skin. I grew heavy with it, angry, defensive.

To be Black, Indigenous or a member of any oppressed class in America is to know traumatic loss. As humans, we are hardwired for the fact that death is a natural part of life. While loss is deeply uncomfortable, we can learn to adapt to the natural phenomenon of loss. But when structural inequalities produce major and secondary losses, leading to widespread collective grief, death is out of balance with life. Individual and collective, repeated and generational, traumatic loss stacked on top of existing natural loss. We must tear down the systems, institutions and narratives that engineer death, fuel it and simultaneously distract us from it. This essential rebalancing act is the charge of 21stcentury social justice movements.

What becomes possible when movements are brought more healthfully to grief, and what can we do to support leaders, organizations and movements to get there?

Cheryl Espinosa-Jones, a grief counselor, author and the host of the Good Grief radio show at VoiceAmerica, offered me four steps for moving through grief, which I interpreted as an offering not only for individual activists and leaders but also for organizations and social movements as a whole.

Step 1: Feel the loss fully. Espinosa-Jones makes it plain: ​“Grief knows what it’s doing.” Grief is wise and ancient and knows what to do. When we interrupt grief’s processes, or ignore them, it can lead to apathy, addiction and unhealthy forms of anger. What loss hates most is to be ignored.

Yet, for centuries, systems of racial, economic and gender hierarchy have disenfranchised the grief of people of color, women, children, disabled people, queer and trans communities, and the poor. Dominant narratives about grief have turned gaslighting into an art form, convincing us that it is safer to deny grief than to feel it. At every turn, we are persuaded that grief is a wild, unacceptable emotion that must be handled, managed, overwritten and hidden. We are pressured by political and even physical force to prioritize productivity over personal well-being, to seek eternity over embodied presence, even as we live through the most traumatic losses.

For each Black life taken by police or interpersonal violence, how many spouses, siblings, children or parents had sufficient bereavement leave? What would happen if Black diasporic communities were to fully embody the losses of land, culture and freedom emerging from chattel slavery? Would agency or apathy be the result if immigrant communities could steep in the loss of land, language and family? Would Indigenous communities across the globe have more or fewer negative health outcomes if there were space to feel and then transform the grief of genocide? As we seek to breathe a new world into being, being an effective changemaker demands the right and power to feel our losses rather than escape them. We must give our grieving bodies what they need, individually and collectively.