Lovers Rock

            My grandma is preparing to bury her second husband, and I’m proud of her. I’m happy for her. I’m not saddened by anything but the promise of her coming loneliness. I imagine it will set in slowly like how old people say cold sets into their bones, but also suddenly like the impact of a car crash. Because that’s what uninvited loneliness does. Nonetheless, I’m so proud of my grandmother for being 74 years old with intentions to wake up tomorrow and plan her second husband’s funeral.

            Adrienne Maree Brown published a blog this past July entitled Grief is Not Linear and It Is Everywhere. Josie Pickens shared it on Facebook, and I clicked on it knowing I’d be exposed to the kind Black Girl Magic that gave slaves the courage to marry and raise families. Adrienne’s post talked about loss, and the bravery of those that love all the while knowing their object of their affection will one day die, or simply change their mind about what forever looks like. I read this post as I was planning a trip to visit my lover and best friend for the Fourth of July holiday. It didn’t change me that day, but it has indeed changed me.

            There are stories about my grandmother that I will never fully know. These stories are of feuds with siblings, infidelity, abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, and other fuck shit that just kind of happens. But what I know—what I’ve seen, is that my grandmother has set aside generous portions of her life and reserved them for suffering. She loved my grandfather the alcoholic. She traveled hours to bury a brother that betrayed her during their mother’s funeral. Right now, she gives more of herself to a child who is a slave to a debilitating mental illness than anyone else that knows or loves either of them. She has buried her own toddler, and tormented herself with the thought of her youngest adult son dying alone in an emergency room. I watched her wail at her father’s funeral. My grandma is in no uncertain terms flawed, and even unfair in her judgments. But she is a fucking warrior. My grandma is a warrior because she knows all kinds of hurts and disappointments, and even now as she fights to regain her strength after a heart attack, she’s planning to bury the man she married ten years ago.

            As I sit here typing this, listening to a playlist of songs that make me think of the man I am deeply in love with, I wonder if I’ll ever be the kind of warrior my grandmother is. Granted, many of her heartbreaks could have been avoided had she practiced self-care. I doubt that she doesn’t have regrets. But in thinking of the ways I shut my own sensitive self off to people, I wonder if I’m built the same way. I wonder if I refuse to acknowledge my mother’s father as my grandfather because as much as I loathe him, I’m hurt by his nonchalance where I’m concerned.  I wonder if I sometimes stay in my apartment alone all day, ignoring phone calls because I’m not meant to be the same kind of pillar of strength as the other women in my life.  I wonder if what I’m on the way to becoming will take me away from everything that is familiar, and if I’ll make it to tell the story.  I wonder if when life takes me from the people I love most, I will break.

            Quite honestly, the only thing that keeps me from being dominated by the fear of all those “what ifs” is the relationship I have cultivated with my boyfriend. I’ve said before and I’ll say again, that our relationship has forced me to grow in places I didn’t know I was small. And very recently, for the first time in our relationship, I don’t worry about our fate. Either one of us will plan the other’s funeral, or we will leave each other. Accepting that and standing in it—like seriously, standing in and on it, the same way Christians are called to stand on their faith—has made me the happiest girlfriend in the world. I am loved today. I was loved yesterday. And if that love is gone tomorrow, I’ll have a plethora of stories to tell about the greatest love I have ever known.

            One day, I won’t be able to call the people I love the most on the telephone. I’m going to miss my momma’s phone calls that are full of details of her day that I didn’t request. I’m going to cry bitter tears over the graves of people I should call more often. And even when I get used to their passing, I will grieve their losses like I grieve the loss of my great-grandmother. Considering these things and these only, it seems insane that people open themselves to love and to lose. But people do it every single day. Which means love must be worth the grief it brings with it. Riva says love is warrior shit. And she is correct. Lovers rock.