ABOUT
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Last Updated: January 2025
One day, when my father was 13 years old, my grandmother got into bed, exhausted and in pain, and she never got out. It was the 1940s, and she was a Black woman with breast cancer. She got into that bed, and she rotted there. It was a horrible death for her and horrifying for her family. Those years became a scar that my father passed on to me, along with her name.
Losing his mother in that specific way during his adolescence did some serious damage to my dad. We all knew it. Even he knew it. Eventually, every woman in his life would realize it — usually while they watched him walk out the door.
My grandmother had a tiny back garden packed with vegetables, fruit and nut trees, and flowers. She was a fantastic cook, loved to decorate her home, had a wicked sense of humor, and an iron will when it came to her children’s education. My father, his siblings, and the neighborhood kids all spent their summers on Gladys Graham Seabrook’s back porch, learning to read poetry, learning history, and math, and about the plants she grew in her garden and their uses.
She’d slice fresh fruit for the kids, and my dad always wanted the largest slice of whatever she was serving. He’d spend soooooo long trying to figure out which bit of apple or peach was just that millimeter bigger. When he finally made his choice, my grandmother would hand the next slice to whoever was behind him and loudly declare, “The biggest piece goes to ________.” My petty queen.
Neither my father nor any of my aunts or uncles would talk about when my grandmother got sick. I know that she was seen and diagnosed at the hospital but that she was sent home to die. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve thought of her in that bed in my grandparent's bedroom, the same one that her husband would die in almost fifty years later. Her view from the bed, the sunlight streaming in through the window behind her, filtered through the leaves on the trees lining the street. The sounds of life in the house below her, her children and husband going about their days without her. The smells of cooking becoming her clock — grits and eggs in the morning, rice with every single dinner.
I recently read “All The Black Girls Are Activists” by EbonyJanice*, and in it, she talks about spiritual imagination. It’s a way of knowing about our ancestors things we cannot know. I’ve always felt close to my grandmother and felt like I picked up parenting my dad where she left off in many ways. Her humor, her sharp tongue, her love of women and children and growing things, I got those. How she wanted nothing more than to sit around plants and read and eat, I got that too. She was obviously a genius.
EbonyJanice gave me the words for how I’d formed that connection, one that I had always before been reluctant to claim out loud. How do you say that you know the grandmother who died decades before you were born? How do you say that seriously and have folks believe you and accept that as truth? In my family of origin, you don’t.
When I first became sick with what we now know is Long COVID, my father did not handle it well. A woman he loved dearly, a mother of young children, with a mysterious illness causing her pain so severe that she couldn’t get out of bed? It was his nightmare. It was what he’d been running from ever since he was 16 years old. Full circle trauma.
“I am the floor through which you cannot fall,” my father used to say to me. “As long as I’m alive, you have a home, and you are safe.” And then the floor fell out from beneath me, my home vanished, and my safety with it. My father died at 94 years old. I had him for 44 years. Decades longer than he had his mother. And it was not enough.
Because of my illness, I was only able to see him twice in the last four years of his life, though we annoyed the shit out of each other on the phone regularly.
He left me money in his will, which I have used to strengthen the foundation for myself, my children, and my found family. I am now the floor through which others cannot fall. I am home. I also used the money to build myself a room. It is blue, like my grandmother’s, though a different shade. The light that comes through the window and shines on my bed is filtered through pine trees in Colorado and not pecan trees in South Carolina.
I rest in this bed; I heal. I create and dream and work and write. I teach my children in this bed. And sometimes, the pain comes for me. Sometimes the fatigue locks me into this bed, and I hear my family move on above my head. Sometimes the smells of cooking become my clock, and I wish that I ever knew the taste of my grandmother’s buttered grits on my tongue. I wish I knew her arms around me with more than my spiritual imagination.
Sometimes the sound of my father’s voice is so loud in my head that I swear he’s about to walk into the room, all southern swagger and hidden vulnerability. Sometimes the fact that I will never know my father’s arms around me again is more than I can bear, and I have to scream.
I don’t want to give my grandmother back her son. I am greedy for both of them, a lost child pleading in the dark. How, thee fuck, am I supposed to raise these children without them? How, thee fuck, am I supposed to survive this apocalyptic time without them? How could she take him back when I wasn’t ready to let him go?
I feel keenly that they are together, and I know that they are with me. We are not links on a chain but some sort of braided rope looping and spiraling in on itself. We cross and move away and are always connected. At this moment, stuck once again in this bed due to a pain flare, I am a toddler in the midst of a temper tantrum. My feelings are too big, too much for me to process, so I flail and kick.
My grandmother sighs. Deeply. She understands and she has no patience all at once. I’m so much like her son.
My father, “This ain’t no damn dress rehearsal. What are you DOING?”
“Nothing. I’m doing nothing. I’m sitting in this fucking bed, missing you and crying. The fuck does it LOOK LIKE I’m doing?”
“Girl, you better watch your damn mouth.”
*EbonyJanice, if you ever read this, I just want to thank you from the depths of my heart for your work in general and this book in particular. I hope you are reveling in your softness and that you know that the ripples of your work are continually reaching out and helping Black women and girls to heal. Sending you so much love, sis.
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