a time to mourn

It's hard to believe I haven't written since September. I couldn't even remember my password. Bad blogging aside, I've had a lot on my mind. Mostly, the big "D" (the dissertation for those of you not in the loop). An avid writer at heart, I'm unaccustomed to the paralysis that sets in each time I approach the "D." Be it fear of failure of its flipside, fear of success, I've had a hard time getting a handle on it and just "doing the damn thing." Holding down a full-time gig and going on the job market doesn't help either. But I'm in the last stretch. I can't NOT do it because there's nothing else to do but DO it. So how do I steal home.

Other than what I've been misperceiving as my "intellectual shortcomings," I've been thinking a lot about death. Don't act so surprised, I do study mourning after all. I haven't been thinking about anything as morbid as my own mortality but rather the deaths of well-knowns that have transpired in recent months.

What sparked this melancholy meditation was the death of Rosa Parks:

dear rosa,
how will we remember you?
as a tired seamstress who refused to budge?
or a tireless activist who had had enough!
will we merely picture your docility-- or can we acknowledge your rage,
that fire that burned beneath your composed demeanor?

For the past couple of days, my thoughts have been occupied by the senseless death of Tookie Williams. For some reason--something beyond our shared last names and the fact that my half brothers may have passed Tookie on the street corners of south central, or in the prison cafeteria--I felt a personal connection with this brother. He proved something I hold steadfast to--something about the possibility of redemption. He was the embodiment of many of reasons I oppose the death penalty and publicly condemn it as a barbaric practice that should shame a purportedly "civilized" nation.

We've also recently lost Richard Pryor, easily one of the most wittingly intelligent men to take the stage. I remember sneaking and listening to my mother's Richard Pryor records or overhearing her and her friends laugh raucously at his bits over a game of spades. The death of this tragicomic figure seems sort of like an end of an era, like the death of Luther Vandross. It's like that final house party or a torn pair of bellbottoms. Or maybe like perming that last Afro.