Collective Grief and the White Body: A Memory

I am in a closet. It’s humid. I hold the phone close to my ear and try to concentrate over the occasional teenage eruptions outside the door. I am in Kentucky on a “service trip”. He would be on the trip with me and the rest of our church youth group if he didn’t have cancer. Sweat is dripping from my ear and pooling at my collarbone. His voice sounds far away and I am distracted again, this time by my hands. They are stained and streaked black from the roofing glue. The smell of the outhouse comes back to me suddenly as I stare at my hands and my stomach lurches a little. For the first time all day, I wonder about the family who uses that outhouse. What do they think of their repaired roof courtesy of a bunch of Christian teens from the North? Are they grateful? Should they be? I am struck by a familiar and fleeting feeling that somehow I am being deceived. Or, more accurately, the feeling that deception is all around me, that it enters with my breath. Followed by the sensation that I am both vital and unimportant in this collective deception. And then finally, the feeling does what it always does - becomes directionless, no longer providing me with information. What is left in its place is the shape of a “we” I am a part of but cannot name. I pick at the dried glue streaks on my hands. 

“...maybe we could get ice cream and go watch the sunset at the state park.” 

“What?” I say, coming back to his voice landing in my sweaty ear from five states away. The shaky, mouth full of marbles sound washes over me as he repeats himself and I realize what he is asking me. He, who would not live to see the end of that summer. He, my six foot tall, muscular, athletic and goofy friend who calls me Jojo. He, who is now a withered version of the teenage boy I jumped over poles with on the middle school track team. He, who I would do anything for, anything but what he is asking of me now. And my sixteen year old mouth cannot form the words to explain to him why. He gets an answer, if not an explanation, from my silence.

He knew he was dying. No one explained to him what that meant, that his cells had gone rogue, that they forgot their purpose, their role in his body’s ecosystem. That science had no way to put a check on their consumption; they and his body could not both survive. His parents made sure no one spoke with him of bodily death. After all, the body, depending on the shape and color it takes, is something to be distrusted, used, controlled, or rendered irrelevant.

But of course he knew. We are our bodies after all, even when they betray us. He knew it meant that he would never feel the stomach aches of falling in love, the chest tightness, warmth and release of tentative firsts, the familiar weight of a long time lover’s head on his shoulder. In the face of this grief, of course he would look to me, his friend, for a cheap version of that which time can only offer. How could I blame him, no matter how much it burdened me, confused me or hurt me? It wasn’t his fault.

Death, in my White, conservative and Christian community of birth was a thing to be conquered, just as the mind conquers the body. Cancer, illness and the bodies they render grotesquely visible, are enemies of the good, the well, the strong. On his gravestone reads the verse, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”. Those without faith fear death, we master it. So when he died at the “unnatural” age of 16, there was no language for the grief. What was grief to those who were bound for heaven? What more comfort was needed than knowing it was all part of God’s plan?

Now, twenty years later, as I watch my mother resiliently forge a relationship with the pancreatic cancer existing and growing inside her, I find myself coming back to the question of grief and the question of god. I get stuck in the fractals of meaning. As our species faces a virus that makes grotesquely visible our collective human body, are we clear about our own parasitic relationship to the body we call Earth? Like those who would suggest to my mother that her cancer is a result of her lack of faith, will we turn to cynical explanations for why this is happening? Like my sixteen year old self in response to her friend’s dying request, will we keep silent because we believe grief is a private affair? Because we believe that we must feel our feelings rationally, individually, and silently? Never should we feel them chaotically, noisily, organically, or collectively. 

I can’t help but wonder if my human longing for connection and communion with forces beyond my brief and fleshy existence has become deeply distorted by the long history trapped inside my White, Western body. I am not sure what, if anything, can be redeemed from the faith of my ancestors, my childhood.  

Recently, my dad reminded me that for my friend’s funeral I had insisted that we release balloons into the air at the gravesite. I have no memory of this, but apparently it was so important to me that I spent hours at the local grocery store in our small town blowing them up myself so that there was enough for everyone to have one. I can still feel her, my younger self, swimming in guilt for his death, for what she denied him. And in her grief, turning to a gesture marked by consumption and waste. Choosing this version of comfort and healing, however deceptive.