Post-Mortem Marketplace
Recent Lessons From Death (Archive Spotlight)
Blessed Wednesday!
Thank you all for your patience and support through the month of April! This is our tentative last piece in the grief series, as the apartment is wrapped and life begins to move forward in a new way. Please be on the lookout for the May divination, recipes, and the next Chapel novena.
Coming back to the newsletter feels like returning to a physical place after a changing time has occurred. April was dominated by my Grandmother’s passing, cleaning out her apartment, navigating this surreal milestone of adulthood while operating in daily life. The past month challenged, blessed, and most of all it provided. I’ve been musing on what I see as a Post-Mortem Market (my gramma loved markets of all kinds), and what fruit I’ve gathered from its booths: faith, clarity, forgiveness, faux furs, spice blends. Whatever I had simmering below the surface has risen to the top, and the spaces made empty from weeping have been filled with love and insight. As we leave April and welcome May, I hope these Post-Mortem Marketplace offerings bless you.
Post-Mortem Marketplace and Addiction
I am walking through an open-air market that I’ve seen before. My heart says Benin or Ghana, my mind doesn’t say anything. It’s one of those journeys I’ve experienced since childhood, dual walking. We are in No-Time All-Time. Dust rises and settles like an inhale-exhale as travelers move. I walk behind my guide, my guide who might also be myself, of me. She is tall and slender and bald, wearing a red top, sometimes she walks with a large basket on her head balanced by one hand. She never looks back but I know she has black markings on her face and gold in her teeth. I walk alone as often as I follow her. We never speak, I don’t see myself stopping at any singular stalls, but I know when I have come to a table and left with something.
On my birthday, I found a new resilience. I worked all day beside a family member, and felt worried at the end of it, feeling that their addiction was reaching for them.
Death opens all sorts of wounds, can make the spirit susceptible. My family member experienced the pain of a relapse that day. I cried on the floor, praying to God they would not die. I went, for the second time in my life, to look for them. And somewhere on that drive I found the strangest gift of peace. Of surrender. Not one I wish folks to experience or learn a hard way, but a gift nonetheless. I can understand, pray, forgive, hold, hope all I want to. I can conjure until Jesus himself come back, and I still cannot change someone’s free will (even when that will is harmful to them). Like any other spirit the most I can do is interfere, persuade, call down extra intercession, perhaps hold Death at bay for a time. But when I realized that whatever was going to happen would happen, I took the weight off of myself. I sent texts of love and prayer as opposed to admonishment. I asked God to help me walk my talk of always supporting a new day, a new hour, a new minute. I prayed for this person to find forgiveness and renewal in themselves, and to come complete the family duties they are called to. I surely called my prayer team in. My loved one returned the next afternoon, hallelujah, hallelujah.
Generosity and Elevation
My grandmother loved beauty. I don’t mean just beautiful items or people but beauty as a lifestyle, a philosophy, a true way of being. She loved to see her grandchildren dressed up, delighted in the milestones of first glamour items. There is not an event I prepare for without thinking of her and my Auntie. My gramma was also someone with anxiety, insecurity regarding looks and overall presentation. This is something we share, and the anxiety has a way of entwining with the love of beauty in a way that calls to mind the uncontrollable false morning glory vine. It’s beautiful, curling, blossoming. It will choke out your garden and lawn, weaken your fences, and take up the nutrients. I found myself sorting full tubs of things, jaw dropped as I turned old CoverGirl products over in my hands. The Queen Latifah CoverGirl era was everything, I wanted all of it as a kid. Wonder would roll away and sadness take its place, frustration at all the waste present and overwhelm around what could be salvaged. Somewhere in the tangling mass of makeup supplies, clothing, perfume, and potions I found a full armoire of attitude adjustments. With no energy for a fancy or eloquent description, let’s make a list:
Appearance: How much time will I spend criticizing myself? This had been on my mind anyway, realizing how many hours or minutes a day I might obsess over something. It’s a blessing to take care of ourselves and to enjoy rituals, but everything needs to be in moderation. Focusing on everything you think is wrong, with a biased perspective no less, is costly. Do your best, put in effort, have fun cultivating your style. Actively combat your criticisms with a verbal love note about you.
Consumption Habits: Not everything needs to be purchased in every scent, color, style. And frankly you don’t need more than two of anything. Being surrounded by more matte pressing powders than legion of ladies could use in six months had my head spinning. The worry that something won’t be available or that you won’t be receivable without that item is an emotional and psychological wound that needs attention and healing, which is very much a part of elevation work. As a societal issue it’s made me more passionate about less waste at home, more reusable products, and using what I own to the last drop.
Sharing Brings Joy: Being a medium has its perks, and one of them has been feeling some reactions as we sort, gift, arrange, donate. I have had the blessing of gifting boxes of tea, books for studying French, and some other items to close friends. I am going to have an honoring tea party using an inherited set, putting the items to work as dreamed and intended. Every single time I use something from her I offer a prayer of gratitude and elevation, asking that her provisions for us be received as offering to the family line. My grandmother lives on in memory, in honor, through implementation of lessons. She lives on through me.
Finding God in Death
My grandmother was deeply spiritual. We used to talk on the phone about church and organized religion, her experiences, her preferences. She was devout to God in her own relationship, never tied to someone else’s fears or expectations. In cleaning her apartment we found hundreds of books, a small religious library is now mine for extended study. She had texts on Catholicism, Judaism, the mystical practices of various cultures, the 6th and 7th books of Moses, astrology beginner guides. There was no singular altar or prayer space. Of her many Bibles, the one most used was the simplest. A plain black cover, somewhat larger text, dotted with bookmarks and carefully penciled in notes. My grandmother was the daughter of the Neighborhood Lady, raised faithfully Baptist in a historic church, traveled and studied; her faith was rooted, well-informed, tested, fortified, personal. Witnessing the remnants of her life brought my own faith relationship into new perspective, something much appreciated as I was sort of itching to shed my skin and understand my current space. Your faith relationship is simply for you. It doesn’t have to match a single other thing, though community and similarity feel nice. You can be interested in many avenues of God, many expressions and reachings of Divinity, and that is well and good.
At the end of the day, faith is personal. It’s in the bones, the heart, the blood. I had begun wearing a crucifix some years before her passing, my view of Jesus growing and changing. Now I wear hers, and a many moons old conversation about Jesus as Ancestor is more poignant. I think of the sufferings she witnessed and prayed against, of the challenges of raising children. I think often of those killed or harmed by police brutality. Over the years I have been blessed to learn from posts and writings by Hakim and I too find Jesus to be a Black man, a community man, and I wonder if my grandmother saw Jesus and Elijah together as I so often do. I wonder if she knew of Eshu and of the Crossroads man justice keeping trickster who carries prayers. Africana religious theory and the human condition beginning to walk together in my mind, and I feel that God is love and compassion in passionate action. The apartment is done and I am wondering how to be love more.
