When Beautifying Your Grief Doesn't Work

"See? I'm better now!"

It’s 5:55 pm ET. Welcome to the sunset edition of the Golden Hour.

A few weeks ago, in the aftermath of my father’s death in February, I wrote a manifesto about how his death inspired discipline.

I said that death was an opportunity to renew commitments, in that vow to honor what our loved ones instilled in us— and that there can be beauty in the discipline, in the struggle to try to transform death into new life. And indeed, I have returned to writing weekly. I’ve been reading more. I’ve gotten back to training Muay Thai several times a week at a new gym, whose community I love. I have also gotten back into practicing sword work. I’ve even begun training a little Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I am writing this in the middle of the night, watching the sun come up. As a writer and journalist, I get fixated on transformation, justice, reinvention, and turning darkness into light. It is why I created this Golden Hour space. The world is terrible; the least that I can do is bear witness and write beautifully out of the darkness.

I was hoping that recommitting to art, whether martial or literary, would deliver me from my father’s death.

But like Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

Over the last several weeks, there were grief blows that nothing could have prepared me for.

First, I was not ready to begin dreaming about my father this soon, and this frequently. Dreams in which he and I are together again. Eating mangoes and plantains (our favorite) and watching YouTube. When he was alive, my dad would watch a lot of TV and order gadgets. I would always ask him how he was feeling, and he always would tell me he was fine, that he wasn’t in any pain, and that he was feeling better. In the last year or so of his life, when he was essentially bedridden, he claimed to have seen an ad on TV for a device that could help him walk again, and asked me to help him order it. Of course, I didn’t and couldn’t know what he was talking about, but I said I would try to help— and see if we could find the gadget. I never did.

Now, in my latest dreams, Daddy is alive—but strapped into robotic technology, proud that he was able to order the right gadgetry. He was not only mobile, but he also healed from death itself. “See?” he said in one of the dreams, excited. “I’m better now!”

And then I wake up. Knowing that his ashes are in a gold urn in the next room.

I usually cry uncontrollably for five or six minutes, give or take. Then the grief hangover lasts the rest of the day. Everyone talks about panic attacks and anxiety attacks. No one talks about grief attacks.

I see why, in many cultures, people shut themselves in for a year, receiving only visitors. But America? We are terrible at helping people through grief. Other cultures realize that being shut in for a while carries some protective wisdom, that exposure to other people’s carelessness or indifference delays the healing process.

Second, someone warned me to be careful about freak accidents, stupid mistakes, or illness. I do not consider myself to be a clumsy or accident-prone person, and I rarely get ill. Yet in the last few weeks, I shattered two of my favorite glass vases that I’ve had for years. The first vase basically exploded when it slipped from my hand onto the countertop—but what I do know is that the glass shards sliced the side of my hand pretty badly, and they fell into Artemis’ food bowl. I had hoped that using flowers, new plants, and new decor to infuse my space with new life would help.

Instead, I ended up bleeding all over my countertop and scrambling to avoid my cat from eating the glass.

Artemis is standing over my recently shattered vase. And judging me.

I put a bandage on it and cleaned it. And like many martial artists I know, I went on to train with my sword despite the injury— the first time touching a sword since my father died.

After a few minutes of doing sword flowers, the wound opened up again, and I started bleeding over the sword handle. I had to stop and go home. (TW for the next image- blood)

Time to pack it in and call it a day.

As for stupid mistakes—nostalgia, as I have written before, has been a frequent nemesis of mine. And she contributed to a mistake I made just yesterday.

I tried to put a new coat of paint in the office of my apartment. I love lush, warm emerald, jewel tones. Impulsively, instead of testing new emerald green shades, I chose a shade that I had used before in my old apartment, Benjamin Moore’s Bavarian Forest. It was the color of my bathroom when I lived with my ex. Maybe I thought I could make old love look like new life. I was wrong.

When the painter finished the room, the shade read more like a dark, greenish navy on camera, darker and different than the bathroom color I had painted before. If there is one shade of blue I cannot stand, it’s dark navy. I’m a perfume collector, and the shade reminded me of a niche fragrance I bought after my father’s death— Senyoko’s Kunjira Densetsu, or “Legend of the Whale” in Japanese. The fragrance makers created the perfume to invoke a dying whale’s final descent into the depths of the ocean, where light doesn’t penetrate. It is a beautiful, challenging fragrance, but one I will forever associate with the grief after my father’s demise.

My painter said I should give the dead whale color some time to settle in, to get used to it. But my soul is rejecting the color. In trying to move forward, I dug up a past I don’t even recognize anymore. In trying to heal from grief, I inadvertently painted aquatic death on my wall.

In person, this is a greener teal. On camera, it’s giving squid ink. I hate navy blue.

I hate it. If anyone has better emerald green color ideas, let me know.

Third, as a single, childless person who has just lost a parent, I realize being out in the world forces me to confront multiple deaths at once. Beyond the death of my father, I am filled with grief over the death of dreams I once had to be partnered and a mother myself. To have my father at my wedding, to meet and be a grandfather to my child. This will never happen. No matter what people say to try to make me feel better, to give hope, the timelines have ended, those portals have closed for my father and me forever. And I feel left behind in life.

All of this was becoming too much. I went to visit an old friend of mine.

Her name is Hopelessness.

I have written before about losing political hope in White America as a Black woman. Educator and racial justice advocate Austin Channing, in her book “I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness”, writes about working in the shadow of hope, not hope itself. “I cannot hope in whiteness, I cannot hope in white institutions or white America, I cannot hope in lawmakers or politicians. I cannot hope for misquoted wisdom from MLK, superficial ethnic heritage celebrations, or love that is aloof. I cannot even hope in myself. I am no one’s savior.”

I mean, I can’t even hope for myself that I can pick a decent wall color, much less stave off death.

These days, I am reading about hopelessness from a Buddhist perspective. In her famous book “When Things Fall Apart”, Pema Chödrön writes about hopelessness and death, and that we must embrace hopelessness and the deaths that happen in everyday life. The disappointments, the job losses, the relationships not working out, the friendships ending, the bleeding hands, and the mispainted walls, all of these are little deaths.

To embrace hopelessness is to realize that beauty and discipline can easily tip into the ugliness of avoidance— a way of trying to run from death and the reality of impermanence. Instead of rushing to re-invention, there is true strength in sitting with my multiple deaths, and resisting the urge to put fake flowers and plastic glitter over the very real bones of old dreams.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll get a new vase. Maybe I won’t. I’ll still write, even if no one ever reads, and the world never changes. I’ll still practice my sword flowers in the park.

And I’ll definitely repaint that damn wall.