The erasure of black life
It’s no surprise that the phrase Black Lives Matter remains contentious six years after it sparked a new movement for social justice. Two murderous vigilantes are in jail and the public eye today because they denied a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, his life. Their community was complicit in that denial until the uproar of a larger community made that silence and denial untenable.
At home here in Greater Cleveland we have been studying the denial of black life through another lens: our disappearance from the communal record.
I came of age as the son of a minister and a choir director. I came to love and appreciate literally hundreds of people through my church, most of them black. These people were a core part of my identity, although I certainly didn’t think of it that way as an adolescent.
I came of age as the son of a minister and a choir director. I came to love and appreciate literally hundreds of people through my church, most of them black. These people were a core part of my identity, although I certainly didn’t think of it that way as an adolescent.
Both my parents died when I was in my twenties. I still remember many of the details of their funerals, notwithstanding my numbness at the time. The kindness of church members and others was a great source of comfort as I processed my grief. The deaths of my mother at 51 and of my father at 61 were noted in the daily papers, acknowledgments of their contributions to the community.
Not long after my Dad died, I became a deacon. I began to attend a lot more funerals. I learned more about the grieving process. As I listened to eulogies and read obituaries in funeral programs, I was routinely surprised to learn details about the rich lives of people I had grown up around and whom I thought I knew.
I came to understand that we all have stories. I also came to regret my superficial attention to some of my predecessors and their stories, which I learned only belatedly and often incompletely. I was late to recognize that I had grown up amongst pioneers, world-class scholars, Tuskegee Airmen, everyday heroes and sheroes.
The world has changed in many ways since my adolescence and my deacon days. One critical way is the loss of common sources of basic information. In Greater Cleveland we are down to less than half a daily newspaper and a diminished crop of community newspapers. Obituaries have become a casualty of the relentless economics of corporate publishers. When your newsroom has been reduced by 90%, the economies of publishing declare that obituaries are an unaffordable luxury.
So, obituaries have disappeared without last rites. Their only surviving relatives are death notices, paid announcements of a loved one’s passing. The cost of such notices, which are now renamed as obits, will give you sticker shock: they run in The Plain Dealer at a cost of hundreds of dollars.
I spoke earlier this week with a funeral director who told me that because of the cost, only about one in ten families chooses to purchase a death notice.
Our community has been reduced to announcing loss of life on Facebook. This seems inadequate to me. Moreover, it seems wrong.
I have written a few obituaries in my life. I have talked to obit writers. The Plain Dealer once assigned a friend of mine, Dick Peery, to the obit beat in seeming punishment for being an outspoken employee and union activist. Another obit writer, Jim Sheeler, who now teaches at Case Western Reserve University, won a Pulitzer Prize for his excellent work in memorializing the dead.
If we do not treasure the lives of those who preceded us and those who have led the way, how can we say we value black lives, or for that matter, any life?
For perspective on that question we reached out to Rev. Marvin McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church and president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School until he retired and returned to Cleveland last year. Via email, he addressed end of life rituals from the experience of one who has preached over a thousand eulogies in churches, funeral parlors, at grave sites, and in mausoleums where bodies had already been cremated:
“It is part of our African DNA to remember and honor our ancestors. In honoring them at death we remind ourselves of the things that link the past, the present, and the future.”
Exactly! The failure to link our past, present and future, leaves us adrift as a community, without understanding, direction or vision.
Over the past few months, we have written and posted some obituaries here. The responses we received have been deeply moving. They speak to the sense of community that we still have, even as we grieve independently over the fact that physical distancing means we cannot grieve collectively. The messages have reinforced the fact that there is a cost when we do not provide appropriate remembrance and closure.
In some ways, our sense of community has been reinforced by the COVID-19 crisis that is laying siege to our values. We are feeding each other, checking up on one another, being more patient and solicitous with one another. Millions of us are masking up for one another, in open defiance of leaders who are ramping up their efforts to divide us. And some elected officials, business leaders, and groups like Ohio Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, D-Akron, State Senator Sandra Williams, D-Cleveland, businessman LaRese Purnell and the United Pastors in Mission, have stepped up in their respective lanes to provide information, resources, and prod those in power to respond with a greater sense of urgency.
We know the black community is suffering disproportionately from this virus. While the disease is no respecter of persons, ethnicities, or classes, the results are foreordained to be unequal when unleashed in unequal spaces.
Even as we wrestle with that fact, and work to mitigate negative outcomes, we must continue to honor the lives of our deceased while we protect and support one another.
We will be reaching out to area funeral directors and clergy to see how we might work together to ensure that every life lost, whether to COVID-19 or some other cost, is appropriately honored as a part of the chain that links our past to our future.
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Editor’s Note: As we prepared to post this story, one of our readers sent us this link from the Washington Post describing how the pandemic is tragically unfolding in the northern Italian province of Bergamo. This screenshot illustrates how that community is suffering and how the lives lost to the disease are being recognized in their local news.
