Dear ones,
This weekend marks the sixth anniversary of the death of a dear friend. In light of that--and in light of the fact that we are all, together, sharing grief on a collective, nearly unprecedented scale (eco-grief, personal loss, the general tenor of active apocalypse )--I am sharing a letter I received for my Dear Comrade column/book. It is a question about mourning, and also it is a question about legacies and how to carry them on.
Much of my response is taken from a previous newsletter I wrote about my friend, so long-time readers will have seen some of it before. (I was hesitant to re-share content, but I promise you: my friend is worth reading about more than once.) I hope it can provide a moment of pause; maybe some assurance that you are not alone in this.
“While loss is deeply uncomfortable, we can learn to adapt to the natural phenomenon of loss. But when structural inequalities produce major and secondary losses, leading to widespread collective grief, death is out of balance with life,” writes Malkia Devich-Cyril. “Individual and collective, repeated and generational, traumatic loss stacked on top of existing natural loss. We must tear down the systems, institutions and narratives that engineer death, fuel it and simultaneously distract us from it. This essential rebalancing act is the charge of 21stcentury social justice movements.”
Below is an exchange in the spirit of that charge.
I love you.
love & solidarity,
raechel
GRIEF AND REMEMBERING
[content note: discussion of suicide, car accident, and police violence]
Dear Comrade,
I recently lost a dear friend in a car accident. Of course I miss them, but more than that I miss the presence they brought to the world. Their influence was so needed and so rare. I feel such a loss not only for myself, but for the ways their creativity and brilliance and militant queerness are missing from the world as I knew it. Even so, I do feel they live on through the ways they have influenced everyone lucky enough to meet them. It is not as if a life cut short is a life wasted—especially as they lived fully and authentically in every moment. I feel grateful for their influence on my life every day.
Do you have any advice on mindful reflections, lessons from radical history, or other queer wisdom to share? I know there will always be some grief, but I want to push forward with this loss turned into strength. I dream of a better world, and they did too. How do we continue to look for and build radical new possibilities as our influences and inspirations are taken from us?
Hope to hear from you,
CAM
Dear CAM,
I’m so sorry about the loss of your friend. If it’s okay, I’d like to start by sharing with you the story of a friend I lost too. I think it’ll find its way into answering your question, but I’d like to sit with you in this space of grieving queer family for a moment first. (I like to take any opportunity in grief to feel less alone, so really this is for me too.)
Almost six years ago we got news that Jesús was on life support. A few days prior he had posted a picture of himself exploring a cave in the desert. He’d been on a road trip with a friend I didn’t know. I was alone at a wedding when I saw the photo of J, scrolling Instagram at a table on a patio in Wisconsin, about to post a picture of the moon that was full in the sky. I was technically single, still wounded from an excruciating breakup that coincided with a C-PTSD diagnosis, but also freshly in love with someone I’d met while teaching a study abroad class in England earlier that summer. I remember feeling melancholy but also romantic. I remember the picture of J interrupting my emo indulgences, and smiling so big at his sweet face, grinning at his spelunking adventure. Being under the moon that night is one of the most vivid memories I have in relationship to Jesús’s death - it was the last time I knew for certain he was alive.
Jesús and I were part of a friend group formed in graduate school that we dubbed “Queerworld,” partly in homage to José Esteban Muñoz’s (J’s favorite scholar) notion (via Michael Warner) of “queer worldmaking” and partly in reference to MTV’s The Real World. Both felt apt, especially on the nights we’d gather at Angela’s house, gossiping, talking about sex, making jokes that often involved Foucault, and eating Pizza Luce. Jesús was known in the group for being a true Sagittarius - he wasn’t inclined to like many people unless they really earned it - and for being a little uncomfortable with effusion. His dissertation was about gay Latino artists in LA. He liked riding his bike and wearing high heels around his apartment (and sending us pictures to document the occasions). He loved men, but was quick to point out racism, fatphobia, and transphobia on Grindr. He was incredibly handsome. Like, stop-you-in-your-tracks-handsome. He was helping raise his nephew, and was also a plant parent and a dog dad. He fought tirelessly for immigrant justice, an issue that personally impacted his family, alongside being involved in many other social justice causes. He once said both earnestly and sassily: “Chicana feminism taught me that I am amazing.”
After our last Pride together, J texted the Queerworld group thread with a bit of an advance apology for the feelings he was about to drop; and then: “You are the horizon.” This a version of a line from Munoz’s Cruising Utopia, about queerness being a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” He was saying, in our nerdy grad school critical sexuality ontology, that the community we prefigured everytime we were together was as close to utopia as we might get on Earth. (After he passed, many of us in Queerworld got the phrase tattooed on our body.)
The details of Jesús’s death are tragic and enraging and complex. My narrative - and the narrative of his political comrades - is that Jesús died at the hands of the State. But it’s also more layered. Jesús, like many people - especially marginalized people living under capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy - struggled with mental illness. He was having a lot of trouble coping with the defeats that all activists experience. He texted me about using pot to numb out from the world that was “just too much.” He was in the throes of dissertating, and the pressure of a racist academic system was getting to him. During his road trip that July, he had some kind of mental break and walked away from the friend he was with. She didn’t know what to do, so she called the police. When they found him, they found an “unstable” queer Latino man with pot on him. They threw him in jail. Hours later, Jesús was found hanging in the cell. He was pronounced dead in a hospital three days after. Jesús did die by suicide, but it was a suicide triggered by the trauma of police violence, and the culmination of a lifetime of being Brown and queer in America.
Since he’s been gone, I feel his absence in specific moments: the ghost of a text he would have sent about a new hookup; the ghost of his voice the last time Queerworld got together in person; the ghost of his body at the protests last summer, where he would have absolutely have been on the frontlines. Sometimes grief has been full-body sobs, shaking from the sadness of how much pain he was in, spiraling back into bargaining, wondering if we could have done more. But more recently it’s been this gnawing empty space that he would have filled. Almost six years of spaces he would have filled. Sometimes I reach my hand out into it. Last night, I swear I felt his palm in mine.
So now onto your question, sweet CAM: I don’t know if we are meant to make lessons out of every tragedy, but I certainly know our queer elders had to do something with the mass of it they experienced. Admittedly, when I think about the idea of his death as some kind of fodder for the struggle, I am uneasy. I would rather him be here, alive with us, than garner any kind of meaning of any of it. But it may be inevitable, in some conditions, that loss is generative.
“Loss,” writes Mirtha Luz Pérez Robledo in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, “when acknowledged among accomplices in the struggle for a more just world, can assist in both tending to wounds and building together to prevent further wounding.”
There may be no better example for this truth than in the history of ACT UP, the movement that began in the late 80s to fight HIV/AIDS. Writer and activist Douglas Crimp argued that during the AIDS crisis, “mourning [became] militancy.” He explains, “Upholding the memories of our lost friends and lovers and resolving that we ourselves shall live would seem to impose the same demand: resist!”
Similarly, in Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS, Deborah Gould argues that ACT UP turned grief into an active tool of resistance by connecting grief to anger. “Street AIDS activists seemed intent on deploying grief in a manner that established a necessary link between that devastating emotion and angry, confrontational activism.”
Dearest CAM, your friend did not die of the same political neglect that killed so many AIDS-stricken elders, but you can still be angry that there is one less queer light in this world. You can still, like our queer ancestors, “turn grief into anger” and then put it toward all your sweet friend fought so righteously against. You can find a way to wield your loss into a weapon against despair. Our fallen queer kin had to, and for them we must carry it on. Anger against all that we hate, and anger that so much of what we love is lost or not yet here or too hard to get to.
Jesús inspires me not because his death was political, but because his life was. He was dedicated to the struggle, and he was also joyful and vivacious and funny. (So funny!) He was an activist but he was also a queer Brown boy who laughed and studied and danced.
I am devastated by the loss of my friend, but the thing that keeps me fighting is his life. I am driven by the memories that I’m lucky enough to carry now in my own skin - my body remembering on a cellular level what it was like to dance with him at the gay bar, to talk to him about books, to cook meals and ride bikes together. I’m fighting for his vitality to be remembered, I’m fighting for a world where a life like his isn’t so excruciatingly difficult to sustain. Almost six years later, it’s his laugh, more than many things, that compels me to face teargas in the streets.
So CAM, how do we keep building new worlds when our inspirations are taken from us? We remember our inspirations. We bear witness to their memory. We get angry, we make weapons of our sadness. We heed the words of poet Paul Monette who died of AIDS in 1992, with this demand in his wake:
“We queers on Revelation hill, tucking our skirts about us so as not to touch our Mormon neighbors, died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of [our graves], it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don’t pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”
Make your grief a sword, CAM. And tell everyone about your friend. They sound so special, and their story will always be part of this new world we’re building. They shaped it while they were here, and they’re shaping it now, through you. So for them, for you, for all of us: keep going.
Love & Solidarity,
Comrade