An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

by Alex Kotlowitz

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

We’re all more than the sum total of our worst experience. I won’t allow myself to be reduced to that single day.

“Bishop Desmond Tutu is quoted as saying, ‘My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.’

“When you start changing for the better and your perspective changes,” he told me, “you start wrestling with good and evil. Ain’t no murder got no credibility to it. Any murder is madness.”

It’s a tradition. Every Father’s Day the two of them get together for pizza, and sit on the small balcony which overlooks both Lake Michigan and the downtown skyline, and there they talk about things they don’t talk about with anyone else. Mike calls his patio their “dome of silence.” For both, their lives have been shaped by secrets, secrets from each other, secrets from others, secrets from themselves. For both, holding on to those secrets have left them floating, alone, with only each other to hold to. They are each enshrouded in silence, silence about what really matters.

At one point she told me that she had a recurring dream in which she grappled with how to tell Shakaki she’d been killed. When she recounted this for me, she said, more to herself than to me, “No, you need to accept it, she’s dead.”