A Dance With Grief

On Love, Loss and Life Beyond Death

“A Dance With Grief” — Original Score by Zach Brose

“But death belongs; it’s not the burden… Endings are not to blame.”
– Malkia Devich-Cyril

As a boy, I was so afraid of death that I couldn't sleep. I would lay in the dark for hours staring into the blue glimmers of moonlight just beyond my window, but rest never came. Terrified of closing my eyes, I held the weight of my mortality in my small hands. 

My worries held me captive. What happens when I die? Will I feel pain? Will I know I am dead? Is there another life beyond this place? My queries frightened me, spacious and cavernous, like a black hole in the depths of the cosmos. 

Here one moment and gone the next? I refused to face the truth of it. Through teary, tired eyes, I figured the only way to ensure I would wake up again was never to sleep. I created an imaginary world where I never had to say goodbye, where loved ones breathed forever. 

For a while, I got lucky. As a high schooler, I reveled in the health of all my grandparents, still alive. I wore it as a badge; life in my corner was prosperous. I even saw my father get sick with Stage 4 bladder cancer and survive. Given two months to live, save for a risky life-or-death operation, he came out stronger. Despite a dismal confrontation with mortality, my imaginary reality void of loss remained intact.

But then It arrived. Like an avalanche, the peace I’d clung to was engulfed by a cold and steady torrent.

The first death showed its spontaneity. It came for Opa, my grandfather and mentor. He kept his ailing heart to himself to shield his wife, my Oma, as she recovered from an ovarian operation that would later unearth cancer. By the time Opa told his children about the pressure he’d been feeling in his chest, his heart was on the verge of collapse. Within a week, he was in surgery for a quadruple bypass. Within two, he was on life support. He never learned of his wife’s cancer.

Personal photo. Opa and I at Hembygden, the family cabin. Around ‘93.

Finally, grief introduced itself to me. It was a strange sensation, heavier and more visceral than anything I’d felt before. I didn’t yet know what to do with this grief, but in the months and years to come, I’d learn more than I ever cared to about its many faces and stages.

A few months into college, death showed its violence. It came for my friend, shot down at a party. He was my role model and the only person on campus who pushed me to better myself. He recognized my aimlessness and urged me to join a mentorship program for men of color. He spoke plainly to me and elucidated my pride like a mirror.

The Tuesday before he died, I saw him on campus. After weeks of trying to convince me to come to the program he’d championed for years, he dapped me up and said, “Man, listen, I get it. You really seem to have it all together…”

I didn’t.

“But trust me, this program has a lot to offer,” he continued. “There’s more for you to learn. Promise me you’ll go on Friday.” 

I promised. But when Friday came, I didn’t show up. Stubborn like my father, I didn’t want to admit I needed guidance. He was killed that weekend. I regretted for years that my last words to him were a promise broken. I felt such tremendous guilt for lying to him that I never missed a session again. For four years, every Friday, I invested in myself and the other Black and Brown men on campus. Each week, I thought of him. Turns out he was right; the program was precisely the grounding I needed.

Shortly after graduation, death showed its impartiality. It came for another friend, a tender presence with whom I had regularly shared long conversations about love, life and faith over coffee and cafeteria lunches. In Monday evening choir rehearsals, her voice regularly moved me to tears. She always sat alone in the corner of the room behind the altos, not because she was shy or lonely, but because her spirit was so big it demanded its own space. My peers and I were repeatedly moved to tears as we absorbed her quiet and contemplative energy, her voice suffusing the room through closed eyes and visible emotion.  

One random Friday, alone in her room, she collapsed from an epileptic seizure. She was not found until Sunday. She was only 24, and her foreshortened life stunned me, leaving me and my community crying out to death, “Why her?”

Personal photo. My college friends and I in St. Louis, following the memorial service for our dear friend and choir peer.

“Why not her?” death responded. As her voice once made me feel held, death now made me feel unsafe and unprotected, regardless of my pursuit of altruism. My friend’s virtuosity did nothing to preserve her life, but perhaps it gave it meaning.

Before long, death revealed another permutation, a psychological one. Two young Black men in whom I had always seen myself reflected committed suicide. The 23-year-old was an acquaintance from high school. We lived in the same small Powderhorn neighborhood and regularly shared telepathic nods through coffee shop windows as we passed each other, now college graduates, as if to say, “I see you. You good?” I’d been told at least a dozen times since high school that I reminded people of him, imagine he heard the same. But he was always more boisterous than me. He was a source of joy for many, with laughter so contagious that I later wondered if it was a mask for a sadness he dared not speak of. I could relate. 

I’d known the younger boy, only 16 when he took his life, since we were youngsters running through church pews in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Black boys adrift in a white world. I regretted not having been more present for him, learned of his passing while lying on a beach in Costa Rica. The polarity of it panged in my chest. Ten years his senior, I could have been a guide, a resource perhaps. My ego imagined that being such a presence, even at a distance, could have saved him. It would take years of torment to learn that I couldn’t. Yet how could a 16-year-old be sure he wanted to die? How could such a fleeting thought mark a life so permanently? Though I had always feared death, life now felt more complex, harrowing and daunting than ever.

Throughout history, death’s ubiquity claimed hundreds of thousands of Black lives, killed by police, interpersonal violence and other forms of systematic harm. But in recent years, this Black Death became so predictable and methodical, broadcasted through public forums of news and social media, that I wondered if peace would ever be possible. I saw friends lose their cousins and communities lose their anchors. How can one find contentment amidst death so compounding? How can one make time to heal in a capitalist worldview where grief is framed as an enemy of productivity? Living in a state of survival, I didn’t have the time or capacity to process it all. As an old structure eroded over time by water, grief—or the swallowing of it—was quickly gnawing at my humanity.

Finally, death came for my sustaining anchors, claiming the lives of my three remaining grandparents, Oma, Louis Polk and Lula Mae. Year after year, kin turned to ancestors, leaving me clinging to an undefined legacy.

Personal photo. My sisters and father at the bedside of our grandmother, Lula Mae.

Personal photo. Pops holding his mother one final time.

Eight years after Opa’s death, I stood in Lula Mae’s living room in West Harlem awaiting her memorial service. She was the last of my grandparents to pass. On the sepia-toned wall ahead of me hung her massive mirror, as dusty and scratched as it was old. I peered into my weary eyes, pondering the life still in them. I looked around and studied the time capsule of old photos, paintings and generational relics in my grandparent's cramped apartment of 60 years. A lifetime of treasures was all that remained of their history and mine. Who would archive their legacy? Who would tell their stories? The consequence of it engulfed me.

My sisters, Jessica and Charlotte, with our grandparents in Harlem, Lula Mae and Louis Polk Williams.

Our Oma and Opa—Alyce and James Hawkinson.

As I examined the bags under my desolate eyes, I realized that every time I’d looked into this mirror over the past eight years, I’d known loss differently. I wasn’t a scared boy anymore; I was a jaded man, so used to death’s touch that it’d almost become unexceptional. The way depression encourages us to make ourselves at home in fear, I’d made myself at home in a constant state of mourning. Death had taken a lot from me, but the suppression of my grief had taken more. Like the receding hairline reflecting back at me in the mirror, I could feel my vitality waning.

With biting clarity, I understood that my relationship with death and grief had to change, or it would take everything from me. Grief, by force, had already transformed me, but I had to learn how to welcome its inevitability and how to keep myself and my community afloat through its enduring depths. My confrontations with suicide had once threatened my life. I could not afford to let grief become corrosive and claim what was left of me. It felt urgent that I use every word, every thought and intention I could muster to rebuild myself.

It took time, but I learned to live with grief. I danced with it. I gave myself permission to feel it fully—even to receive it as a gift. It was a matter of perspective. Loved ones came and went, but their spirits endured. Could this spirit be a tool for repair? What life could I find in death’s tow?

My wife, Courtney, staring out at the farmland in Alabama that has been in her family for generations.

In small ways, through writing, earnest conversation and reflections in nature, I rummaged daily for my humanness in the ruins of death and despondency. Slowly, a new relationship formed. Death saddened me, but it was no longer the taboo that once robbed me of sleep, like a curse that shall not be named. Death was absolute and impartial. As much as I resented the solemn pit it built in my stomach, I respected it.

I marveled at how something as existential as a breathing being can so quickly turn ephemeral. Impermanence marked me and got me thinking about all the living yet to do. The losses of loved ones were like tectonic plates beneath my feet; they shifted and broke apart as the people I loved died, stirring up friction and storms. But when the dust settled, I saw a new world—lands not yet ventured, possibilities not yet comprehended.

I finally began to view death for what it is: as vital to humanness as life itself. And a connection to the deepest part of myself—the place where body, cosmos and spirit align. Beyond grief’s acrid fruit came the thunderous affirmation that I was alive. I began to see life's fragility, vulnerability and possibility. I was eager to honor it, to live vibrantly.

Personal photo. My wife and I midway through a Grand Canyon hike.

Personal photo. My wife and pup soaking up the beauty at Mammoth Lakes.

My world became more colorful. Time slowed down. Food tasted better. The breeze felt more intimate. I blanketed myself regularly in the sun's warmth. My patience grew and my pursuit of perfection dwindled. I revered life’s duality: a meld of torments and miracles. But before long, death's blessings began to outweigh its pains.

There was newfound pride in watching my 75-year-old father as he chipped away at 20 years of emotional suppression by caring for his mother in her final years. His body arched and aching, he selflessly gave of himself, moving cities to ensure his mother lived out her last years surrounded by love and companionship.

Personal photo. My pops showing his mom how his phone works.

I cheered on my mother, a sudden empty-nester struggling to recenter herself, caring for her mother who was dying of cancer. They spent those final few months soaking up the sunshine, listening to their favorite orchestras, and sneaking out for pizza and ice cream. My mother told me those days reminded her that magic awaits us daily. Our little joys and wonders can activate a life of purpose if we’re alert enough to its splendors.

Personal photo. My mother and father at the resting place of Oma and Opa, my mother’s late parents.

When our cat had a seizure and died in front of me and my wife, we leaned into the depth of our loss. We sat in silence and tears for days, mourning the sudden absence and traumatized by his violent and premature end. We became keenly aware of how significant our pet’s presence was to our balance and happiness in those days. He gave us something to ground ourselves in daily, build a routine around, and pour our love and affection into. As we grieved our favorite playmate, we practiced companionship more intentionally. We learned to cherish the frenetic, spontaneous moments of adventure as partners.

Personal photo. Our cat, Moksha, taking a nap in his favorite spot: my writing desk.

Personal photo. My family and I with our (still young) pups, Mandy (left) and Franklin (right).

I had a similar experience with my sisters, as our two childhood dogs passed away in the past couple of years following a short lifetime of delight and laughter through youth and into adulthood. We were afraid to let them go because these beloved pets were the final tether to a childhood that left us yearning for safety, stability and comfort. Franklin and Mandy bounded a family frayed by fatigue and anger and transformed us through small, daily moments of levity. They provided enough light in a dark time to pull my family and me, in unison, out of depression and into gratitude and patient contentment.

Death truly tested me in December of 2022 when it came for a young friend. He called me “Big Bro,” which made it hurt that much more when he passed suddenly of a heart attack at age 30. Though I didn’t know him intimately, he was one of the brightest lights I’d ever known. Committed to building up Chicago’s dilapidated communities through art, he was recognized as a sheer force of will, passion and service across the city. Given my work cultivating Chicago’s creative community, we shared resounding conversations about everything: relationships, companionship, community, creativity, service, purpose. His loss was an affirmation that tomorrow is not promised—that nothing is more important than how we show up for ourselves, our loved ones and our communities today. He reminded me, both in life and in death, that we are each other’s keepers, and we must water each other for the growth of us all.

One recent evening, on the couch, I began longing for conversations with my late grandparents. Solemnly, with tears in my eyes, I looked at my wife and told her I pledged to be present for her as she grieves through her inevitable losses. My grief had crystallized, giving me new tools for support and healing. When her grandad unexpectedly passed a few days later—and her brother only months after that—I grabbed her hand, held her close, and joined her in this dance with grief. I fed her, listened to her, nurtured her. I encouraged her not to hasten her steps like I often tried to. I urged her to feel and move to the dramatic swells of its rhythm. Those days were incomprehensibly difficult. But the challenge before us each morning was simple. Choose life or don't. Seek gratitude and glad memories, even in the abyss. Let the chasm of our losses deepen our appreciation for both.

Personal photo. My wife and her father following the memorial of her grandad—his father—Phil.

Personal photo. My wife, Courtney, looking out at her family farm in Alabama, where her brother stayed before his passing.

At last, I realized it wasn't death I feared as a boy; it was life. 

I was afraid to live, paralyzed by the knowledge that, at any moment, life could strip those I love. That my time might be cut short, my imprint on this planet small and unproductive. It took me decades of unlearning to name productivity a mirage of purpose and any goals set against it as faulty. We are meant to live; that is it. To soak up every drop of beauty, passion and color we can while we're still here. To close each day by saying, Indeed, I am fulfilled.

We are all connected by a boundless web of love and loss. Though grief will always inflict great pain, it does not have to bring our (permanent) destruction. Grief is a sobering reminder, unendingly, that we love and are loved—that our capacity for either feels impossible. And yet, it is. Our hurt implores our appreciation; we are alive. 

In all my agony, this dance with grief was essential to embracing the splendor of life's song. The fear that once stifled me now propels me. 

When I lay in bed now, shrouded in darkness, I think about how grateful I am to have known grief. I smile, understanding I am better for it, more centered because of it. I embrace grief's lasting grip because I feel most connected to the fullness of my humanity in its hold. It reminds me daily of the depth of my love. 

This hole that grief hollowed within me is not a cavern; it is a well. Each loss unearths a new depth previously thought untenable. My responsibility to this life is to refill this well, again and again—to drink from it when nostalgia leaves me depleted and to nourish those whose wells have dried up.

Personal photo. Me, “filling up my well” amongst nature and my thoughts.

Grief urges me, and encourages us all, to reject the sedation of a life that beckons our pleasure, dignity and celebration.