MEYSHA: Good Evening. I have some instructions for your journey & listenership tonight. Listen closely. Laugh when uncomfortable. You will hear a series of pieces written by a sad black girl about her obsession with death and the secrets it reveals. While sad, this sad black girl is multifaceted, so THIS is just a snapshot on. How do I know you want to hear this? 

 

This just in: “Black deaths have gone up 78% in searches on every major search engine. 

 

Lucky for you, you will only have to view this through the safety of the theatre, and the many screens you have at your disposal: tv screens, privilege screens, I don’t see color screens, and of course the ever necessary: “i don’t believe black women’s pain screens” But Please above all else. Remember this is NOT, this is NOT, This is not for your entertainment.

 

I forced myself to read my mother’s death certificate. 

I had to read it over and over and over and over. 

After a while I’d memorized parts of it. Would call them to mind randomly, not so randomly. 

Like:

Magnolia street

Time of death: 9:50pm

GSW, 

How somebody told me

that if she had not been shot in the head, her heart was strong enough to have made it.

How long it took her organs to decide that life could no longer fill her bullet riddled Body. 

My mother taught me to walk before She died.

I know this because my sisters told me.

My mother with the strong heart. 

I wish I could remember what being held by her feels like.

what her Heart may have sounded like

With my head pressed against her chest.

Alive and beating

And alive.

And beating

Are you allowed to mourn your mother if you only have pieces of memories that are more borrowed than anything. 

I always 

Imagine what I was doing at the exact moment her heart stopped

I wonder if I even knew.

No one bothers to explain death to a toddler. 

They baby talk to you  crying

No one explains dying. 

There is a lot of sighing that happens around death
at 2 I took in a deep breath and held it.

For 20 years i have been holding my breath

What death does to the living is disgustingly and grotesquely fucked up. 

And I am obsessed with it. 

 

-i wish i knew the difference between when my secrets are being exploited and when i’m being genuinely listened to. As people we are naturally just so curious. That inevitably there are questions. Which means there’s also askers.

 

You’ve probably been an asker

You hear of someone having a loved one pass away and you immediately, without hesitating say: “how did it happen, if you don’t mind me asking” or “how did they die, if you don’t mind me asking”. You’ve never thought of it as rude or too pressing. It’s just your natural curiosity that leads you to asking. You want to know. I mean really know. I’ve gotten down my answer really good for the askers, but it’s taken me years of discomfort and anger to get it right. Now I say: “My parents were murdered. My mom when I was 2 and my dad when I was 7”. 

I say it that way because when I just used to say that they died, folks weren’t satisfied. THey’d assume a dual accident of some sort took our parents from us. So I added that they were murdered, to be more clear. Since you have to with the askers. You owe them every piece of the story that they feel, once heard and explained would then answer or unlock some wondering or mystery about you that they’d been struggling with. Man, you cannot even imagine the fun I have had while people squirmed and twisted themselves around every question that they had ready to fire from their crusty, rude ass lips. “Wait, murdered?! Oh, I’m so sorry. Wait..how? If you…don’t mind..me asking??” They need to know. They just have to have that juicy information about me. It’s not real to them. The only real thing most people who have lived a life untouched by acts of violence and murder can connect my life to is a Law & Order episode. Or a movie. 

Movies and books love to romanticize the story of parents dying. A fiery car crash is usually how it happens. Oh bummer! Now the protagonist in the story gets to have a coming of age tale while you read on satisfied with this bullshit portrayal of how the absence of parents due to violent means really fucking feels. It is a repeated pain that only dulls and then spikes but never goes away. 

Kind of like a toothache. But more death filled. Less tooth achy, more death achy. 

 

-

Talking about aches and pains always reminds me of my grandmother. She’d say had ol arthur, when talking about her arthritis. She loved to tell me about her new aches and pains. She’d say: “don’t get old like me Meysha child. I got arthur in my hips, my knees, and my neck been painin me. “ but man...She had this strength. Ooowee. Well you know. Everyone always talks about us black women. And how strong we are. If i’m being honest sometimes I feel i’m betraying my people because of how strong i’m afraid i’m not. Not like the women in my family who held secrets so strongly you’d think they were competing for who could hold more. And sometimes. I worry, like alot of people probably do, that i might be becoming my grandmother.
 

I’m basically becoming my grandmother

 

like daaaayummmm. I grew up and became Albertaaaa Woolen.

 

She would sing her name on our voicemail every time she called in case we didn’t know who was calling.

It was Grandma.

And she was always in a housecoat. I don’t know what they’re actually called but I’ve also heard them referred to as ‘moo moos’. They were made of what seemed to be linen and had faded patterns of once bright floral scenes.  Most of her house coats had large side pockets on either side of the opening. I loved that she’d always put her hands in her pockets. I noticed it because we’d always been discouraged from putting our hands in our pockets. My great aunt would say it wasn’t ladylike, or that it would make us look shiftless if we’d walk around with our hands in our pockets or behind our backs. But, at my grandma’s, I knew I was free to dig my hands deep into the pockets of any jacket or pants I’d chosen specifically to wear over there.
Because my Grandmother did it too. 

 

my Grandmother lost her mind

when my mom was murdered.

or that’s what  i was always taught to tie it to.

and it makes sense. one day she told me that she knew my mom was going to die before it happened.

she had stormed out of the house that day after one of my Grandfather’s mistresses called the house again for the umpteenth time that day.

the woman on the other end of the phone would say “is Ernie there”. 

His name was Ernest, I thought only Grandma called him Ernie. )”

she’d ask that, and my grandmother as patiently angry as could be would say: “No.”

in an almost quiet yell and hang up the phone with an aggravated sigh. 

 

I have a few ideas as to why she continually answered the phone. But I don’t think I really need to explain them.

sometimes love is fucked up in how it fucks you up. and that’s fucked up. alright?

I loved my Grandma.

Most folks I know do, so I don’t mean to sound as if i’m so exceptional or like i’m the shit because my grandma was amazing, but I swear on everything. she was bomb.

and so ain’t it just perfect that i’m becoming her.

but not the parts i admired.

the ones that made me shake with second hand embarrassment when “is Ernie home” would call and Ernie was actually home. and Alberta Woolen would hand over the phone to her husband, knowing full well that the mother of her husband's other few kids was on the other line.

Ain’t that some shit?

 

I can’t believe I let myself get cheated on. I can barely laugh now about the irony of reading a text on my ex’s phone a few years ago that

read “i’m glad she thinks all we did was kiss, that’s all she needs to know”. with the cutest wink face emoji that 2010 technologies could muster. 

I’m not bitter about that anymore. I only needed to tie it in here to show you how this is all sooo ironic and whatnot. You follow?

 

Everyone in my family called my grandmother Sis. Even her mom, my great granny. Her nieces and nephews called her Auntie Sis. Ernest called her Sis. I never thought of that as weird. I have no idea who started it. I’m assuming one of her 5 siblings. And everyone embraced it. 

 

My best friend Brian calls me Sis. That nickname feels right to me. It feels like the warmest, sweetest, drippiest memories of long muggy Youngstown summers. He’s never been to Ohio but I want to take him someday so that I can take him to the good parts. The parts that don’t remind me of where there was a blood stain for the longest time of my mother and her friend’s bodies where they were killed on the Eastside. 

I don’t know if its still there. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been replaced with some other bodies. Somebody’s? You know what I mean.

I talk a lot about death. You’ve noticed. 

and I guess that’s another way I’m becoming my Grandma.

She said she knew that my mom was going to die because two black crows came and told so her that day that she’d stormed out of their house on Sunshine Ave. 

Grandma said that she heard the door clatter close behind her. That door always refused to slam because it was a weaker storm door than could weather an even weaker marriage. But she’d tried anyway. To slam it hard. To release a flood of anger into the rackety door and rattle the house enough to shake out the devil. She never did.

There was a black iron railing that circled the front porch of the house. Apparently, these birds landed right in front of her. And they were the biggest birds she’d ever seen. One was silent, the other was shrill and cawed my mother’s nickname, Leenie. Like  lean-e.

Grandma said she heard it clearly. It’s hard to believe because she was legally deaf and rarely had batteries in her hearing aid that wouldn’t beep and whine every few minutes.

I don’t know how the bird saying my moms name translated into her and her best friends being killed the next night, but it did, and Grandma never liked birds after that. 

 

I’ve always been afraid of birds. In fact, I hate them. In twos they always look like death to me. One that’ll announce itself, and the other, that’ll come when you least expect it.

 

Like my Dad, 5 years later. 

 

And you know what

There’s something to be said for my having had no idea how my father was killed. Not a clue. I asked multiple people over the last few years, and I’ve been met with bits and pieces of a story that sounds too crazy to be true. I used to be too afraid to look into it myself.

But I decided to anyway. 

Because I’m becoming my grandmother 

and I’m obsessed with death, 

and people know and recite stories about their living, breathing parents all the time, 

and so I figured I should at least know how it happened. 

For

Myself and

for the askers. 

 

That’s another story.

And I DO mind you asking.