Hum If You Don't Know the Words

by Bianca Marais

Privacy is not a concept my people understand or desire; we bear witness to each other’s lives and take comfort in having our own lives seen. What greater gift can you give another than to say: I see you, I hear you, and you are not alone?

Each minute that passed without my crying or thinking or remembering was an achievement, and I knew that if I strung enough minutes together, it would keep getting easier because it had to.

We were each alone in the bubble of our grief, and while it’s true that misery loves company, sorrow is not reduced or diminished in any way even when it’s shared.

Life wasn’t fair and it amazed me how everything was the same as it ever was. It was only my world that was unrecognizable.

Perhaps that is what it means to get old: you must let the young ones sing their own songs.

I begin to pray. Lord, please take this hatred from me. Anger is a self-administered poison and I want no part of its contagion.

Dr. King’s words move me exactly because they are a more eloquent expression of my own feelings: “We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.”

I didn’t know what to say in a world where people were hated and attacked for not being the right color, not speaking the right language, not worshipping the right god or not loving the right people; a world where hatred was the common language, and bricks, the only words.

I can't put this book down

Only after I had learned those boundaries and generalities of my grief was I able to venture further into the mountains and valleys, the peaks and troughs of my despair. And as I traversed them—breathing a sigh of relief thinking that I’d conquered the worst of it—only then would I finally arrive at the truth about loss, the part that no one ever warns you about: that grief is a city all of its own, built high on a hill and surrounded by stone walls. It is a fortress that you will inhabit for the rest of your life, walking its dead-end roads forever. The trick is to stop trying to escape and, instead, to make yourself at home.

But you couldn’t outrun your fears because that was the thing about fear: it was a shadow you could never shake, and it was fit and it was fast and it would always, always be there just a split second behind you.

In the darkness of my grief, she’d taken my hand and walked with me through the crucible. She’d brought love and life and color into my world, and I’d never see things in simple black and white again. She’d helped me realize that life wasn’t the kind of story that had a happy ending. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I’d come to believe that a story that ended happily was just a story that hadn’t ended yet.