Trending everywhere this week and for damn good reason is this Vanity Fair essay from novelist Jesmyn Ward, the kind of writing that takes you by the hand, leads you right into the deepest corners of a writer’s heart, forces you to listen, feel, stay and then do your best to move the world with purpose.
In the essay, Ward writes about the visceral grief of losing her beloved husband in January just as a pandemic began tearing the nation apart, killing hundreds of thousands and exposing the slew of systemic injustices keeping the most vulnerable at the bottom of the totem pole.
One of my favorite places in the world was beside him, under his warm arm, the color of deep, dark river water.
After the senseless death of George Floyd at the hands of police, with Minneapolis burning, protests across the nation and the world amplified by masses of witnesses, “the revelation that Black Americans were not alone in this,” she writes, “broke something in me.”
Even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time.
It feels impossible to read Jesmyn Ward and not feel more liberated, to not have your heart break apart only to open up and expand. I am shattered and grateful. I am here to stay and fight.
When my Beloved died, a doctor told me: The last sense to go is hearing. When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.
I hear you.
I hear you.
You say:
I love you.
We love you.
We ain’t going nowhere.
I hear you say:
We here.
—fiza
A big hug to supporters Cary Adamms, Sam Kruger, Arielle Lewitt and Salima Makhani.