I
will carry with me the memory of when I first found out that Nelson Mandela
died. I was in the lobby of a hotel in midtown when my best friend put her hand
on my shoulder, pointing to the TV. I didn’t register at first what they were
saying, but she repeated: “Nelson Mandela just died.”
There
is something about death that makes my teeth ache. It brings me back to other
losses. I started Googling the name of my drama teacher from high school who
passed away last winter to find her acting profile, and although it was a year
ago, I again felt that absence pressing down in my stomach like a stone. I
wrote about my naiveté during that time, how I believed “you couldn’t
possibly lose someone whom you loved enough.”
I
am sure that it is a similar feeling with Mandela for many people. While I can
only relate to him as a public figure, someone we talked about in history classes
and when I was first getting into radical activism, I am still reminded of the
profundity of loss. It can be all-encompassing and make your joints ache like
you are old before your time. We are pleased to note that he lived a full life
and died at an old age, but the loss still weighs heavy on us.
A
member of my community recently died at a rather young age, and though I personally
didn’t know them well, their death tipped a whole community into action. It made
personal the issues that they was battling with and brought us all out of a
collective sleep about things we often think abstractly about. Lack of care,
lack of knowledge, slipping through the cracks… Contrary to Mandela’s passing,
it felt like their life went unfinished. And many were left raw with their
emotions, blowing up at one another because of it.
So,
as I am consuming more and more media about Mandela’s life – in the glowing
idolized way that we talk about it or in the down-to-earth representations of his
life, about the fake sign language interpreter and presidential selfies at the
funeral – I am also seeing visions of other grieving periods and other deaths. There
is anger there, mixed in with sadness. For those who live on, grieving lets us
become liberated with our own emotions.
I
don’t want to idolize Mandela’s legacy any further than it already has been. I
want to acknowledge that his life was messy, just as messy as the aftermath. I
want to hold on to the idea that we are all works in progress, and that death
is yet another moment of transition. But I want to go back to my somewhat naïve
notion that you cannot lose someone who you have loved enough. I still believe
this, though now I think of it as a different kind of process. Sometimes it can
be clean. We shave off the excesses, the complications of their life and make
them a symbol to play a part in our continued struggle. And sometimes it can be
messy. We generate more and more ways to deal with our anger, with our sadness.
We do not sit with those emotions unless we are using them to act. And it takes
immense effort to cut through all of that to get back to what our main goal
was: to love that person enough so that their memory is not lost.
I
hope that as we use the stories of our losses in the future as ways to motivate
our actions that we may also reflect on these people not only as symbols, but
as the same messy individuals that hold us accountable every time we invoke
their memory.
