The Death of Vivek Oji and My Grief.
This book WRECKED me and also answered many unanswered questions I had about grief.
Friday night I finished Awaeke Emezi work of art, The Death of Vivek Oji and while sobbing on my couch and snapping a quick pic to post on instagram (you have-not lived until you post a crying selfie on the internet)
I started thinking about my relationship with grief and my avoidance of it if we’re being honest. I have been smacked in the face with death and my own mortality more than I would like to admit but while I was reading, this quote stopped me in my tracks..
“His grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji
I wondered if I was him, if my grief had been chasing me all these years silently begging me to slow down so I could spend some time alone with it. I don’t know how to spend time with my grief because I’m afraid once I do it’ll hit me like a tidal wave, dragging me under and never letting me go. How do we grieve a life we’re still living?
My grief is a part of me, a part that I might miss if I had to truly let it go. I feel its calming presence at my back, holding me as I sleep and tucked in around me as I write this substack. But there is a larger part of me that wants to process this grief and then let it go…I want to acknowledge the elephant in the room and lay it to bed.
My grief is present when I look at my mom too long as she’s holding my niece. I yearn for the moment where its me, her and the baby she’s holding is mine. I dream about the happiness i’ll be able to witness on her face as our lives come full circle, that my future baby will be loved in the same way she loved me - with every fiber of her being. I grieve for the version of Breana who may not get to experience it because mom is close to 100 years old and I know she’s at the end of her fully lived life while I feel like I am just beginning. mine. I grieve for the not yet born baby who may only experience mama in stories and not lived in moments. They may not know her smell, or the way her nose crinkles when she smiles, or the perfect recipe for her Malibu and pineapple night cap or that feeling of home that washes over you as you enter the house. The pain comes and goes because I am already grieving my parent who is still living, I am allowing myself to process the pain of when her body isn’t physically here and she only lives within me.
I grieve for my 20s, which were spent not only loving and learning but filled with a touch too many regrets. I gave ALL of my 20s to a man who discarded me as I entered my 30s. He discarded me in the way we throw out the end of blunt because there is nothing left to smoke, the way we throw our lit cigarettes out of a moving car window, or the the crunched up wrappings as if its a basketball and the trash can is the hoop. I grieve for that version of Breana because this version is hardened and a little angrier at the world. Angry at the way we’re instructed to fall in love, to submit and everything will work out. It doesn’t, or at least it didn’t for me. That grief comes in waves, where I am recounting just a piece of my story and using my pain as the punch line and nobody laughs. It’s in the silence where I am forced to face that grief. Grief of a life that didn't work out like I had planned. Grief for the loneliness I had to face.
Vivek Oji made me want to face my grief, they made me want to invite it over for dinner and unpack it before sending it home one last time. They were a reminder that I am still alive and my grief cannot win and maybe, just maybe it’s time to stop running and let her in.