Walking in...Funeral Day in the South

Late September, 2019. Chapter 1. Part 1.

Why did they have a fake cotton plant on the built-in shelves that flanked the TV and the fireplace? We had been living in this house for nearly a month, and every time I passed it, I curled the right side of my top lip and rolled my eyes. It had me feeling some type of way because the owners of this Airbnb were white folks, and we were in Georgia, so that cotton plant had a particular connotation that just never settled in as alright with me. To be fair though, nothing sat right with me on that particular day. I stood in front of the bookshelf littered with white vases, small white pillows with gold embroidered letters, wooden ornaments painted white, just a sea of whiteness contrasting my Black ass in ways I noticed more than ever before.  

I stood there, holding my notebook with both hands, looking at my small audience of funeral goers, my partner, Kris, and Marley and Sage, our daughters. My phone was on top of the notebook and my thumbs held the phone to my notebook. Both held words I knew I needed to get out on that particular day. And as I stood there, the fake cotton plant argued with my notebook and phone for my attention.

Perhaps that cotton plant was appropriate, or at the very least relevant, to this experience of a Black woman's death, after so much labor. Labor she carried that was not hers to carry, but her situation didn't offer her any options she dared choose.

The notebook and phone carried words that she would use to speak out loud a detailed eulogy. This eulogy was for a woman that was so familiar to me for so long, and was also familiar, close even, to the other three people who were at the funeral--my partner Kris, and our daughters, Marley and Sage.

It registered as an impossible task, but a required one. Because even though I'd written eulogies before, they were for old people whose bodies had always been separate from mine. People I had viewed from the safe distance of Over Here. People I had loved and had told them so. This time, this woman was all-the-way different. She had lived with me for at least two decades, maybe lifetimes, and I hadn't seen her as separate from me. I just called her me.

On that day, I was dressed in black tights, a black T-shirt, and black platform fuzzy peep-toe house shoes. I'd put on jet-black mascara, dark blue eyeliner over my top lid, and carefully traced the surface of my lips with purple lipstick; mortuary cosmetology. The lips were most important because a purple lip is like a weapon for me. It's something like a shield, a visible thing I put on not just when I'm trying to be cute(er), but when I need a little extra something to face something emotionally heavy or unwanted.

I don't even remember what my funeral party had on. I just remember that I was shaking. And I remember being nervous about how both my daughters, especially Sage, who was about 13 at the time, would feel about this. But I wasn't going to shy away from being myself around my children. I had learned through years of unschooling that it was imperative that I didn't make unnecessary delineations between who I was and that I was in my role as mother. Sometimes that delineation was necessary; this was not one of those times. I pressed my purple lip courage together and opened my book, sitting my phone on the right side of it, and reading from the left. I read out loud the parts that felt safe enough to share. I read slowly and loud, careful not to ad lib, just to say the things so that my people could bear witness to them.