Living With Loss and Remembrance

I live with loss.
I live with loss as ghosts and as absence.
I live with loss and remembrance.

I am thinking about the loss of my older brother from AIDS at the height of the epidemic; my father from issues of excess and consequence separated by my distance from him; of my mother from the grim reaper called a drunk driver on an early morning when she was leaving to lead the rosary; a sister from circumstances of birth and adult neglect that bartered joy and distraction; and of another brother who embraced an inheritance of indulgence negotiating pleasure and pain. Each in order. Each in their own time.

Loss, regardless of circumstance, is a void in the absence of presence. A void that is only filled with the remembrance of living, always loving, and maybe sometimes learning.

Living as a tribute to being and becoming; loving as an act of holding onto memory with the embodied presence of the other in the self (as with blood family) looking back in a mirror; and learning from choices made: loving with caution, everything in moderation, looking both ways before crossing — then looking again, the importance of self-care, and the practice of reserve within abundance.

I live with loss.
I live with loss as ghosts and as absence.
I live with loss and remembrance.

Ghosts don’t always haunt. For me, they visit with messages of care and caution. They visit with reminders of who I am in relation to them, and who I am becoming; apparitions of the past and future. I embrace them as a near daily reunion. And despite the inability to hold or touch them, I receive the feeling of their presence in palpable ways. I invite them, and we visit for a while. I keep an ofrenda in my workspaces at the office and at home. In the office it is as simple as a photo of my parents in a dancing embrace; a photo that I took — so they are looking towards me.

My father with his signature dark sunshades to protect his always sensitive eyes. My mother with a light in her critical clear glasses seeing all. Each looking at me while posing for the photo and thus looking at me from the photo — daily; daily they look at me in their absent presence in my workaday life. And I look to them for advice and comfort. At home the same eyes follow me, joined by the siblings of my childhood and adulthood. We are captured in the celluloid solemnity of photos, still, but lively photos that move just a little — capturing the moments before the shutter snapped. My memories animate the photos. And they are alive again. We are alive again, together — then and there, here and now. In these daily viewings and visits, my memory plays tricks that I am fully complicit in.

We all live with loss.
We all live with loss as ghosts and as absence.
We all live with loss and remembrance.

To experience loss is all a part of living with the knowledge of death. And in our shared faith there is a promise that this momentary loss will be redeemed. We shall be together again, and what was lost will be found.

And then we shall celebrate with overflowing joy.

Bryant Keith Alexander is professor and dean of the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of nine books including, with Mary E. Weems, “Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory, and Resolution: Reflections on Black Motherhood” and “Black Poetic Inquiry: A Daily Writing Project on Race, Culture, and Life.” Bryant Keith Alexander’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.