Risking Our Lives to be Consoled
By Erika Abad
I ask my girlfriend how to write about what we’ve experienced on top of quarantine. She tells me that she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to be judged about the risks we took to receive comfort. She recognizes it’s important. It’s important to talk about how, amid quarantine and civil unrest, Black families have additional forms of grief exacerbated by quarantine and the civil unrest.
In January, I went to Puerto Rico to bury my grandmother. Throughout February, March, and April I was undergoing radiation to prevent the borderline phyllodes tumor doctors had removed. By June, the hope of slowing down stilted with the call to go to the hospital because my girlfriend’s brother went into cardiac arrest. After a decade-long struggle of illness, my girlfriend presumed it was another almost-death because of the fight he had in him. But battling relapsing polychondritis is, on average, a decade-long struggle. And he reached the average, he reached the average and grew weary.
Quarantine disrupted the ride schedule I had made for the 33 sessions of radiation I had to undergo. Between my girlfriend in grad school and our teaching schedules, we needed communal support to get me to treatment. My friends came with me. My rides and I were often the only Black and people of color in the treatment center’s lobby. I noticed that. In the lobby, where intake staff and assistants roped up and wiped down lobby chairs, we watched HGTV while talking about our experiences with women of color. When quarantine started, HGTV remained airing in the lobby while the radiation patient waiting area we entered on signing in, began airing presidential press conferences. My Puerto Rican ancestry started ringing, recalling that the presidential response to post-Hurricane Maria struggles was paper towels all the while they were ignoring the toll of January’s earthquakes.
It is important to pay attention to the way my color exists, especially when I’m trying to heal. Between quarantine and civil unrest, life had provided us with additional forms of outrage and grief. I pay attention to my color, how I receive news and greetings and smiles, because two months after kissing my grandmother’s cold forehead, I am struggling with hearing about how long quarantine can’t last because we have an economy to save.
An economy that took little consideration for people like my grandmother.
As quarantine settled across the country, my family of origin and I expressed relief that my grandmother passed when we had the means and opportunity to say goodbye without risking our health. She passed at a time when we could still fly, when we could still hug and kiss and forget to wash our hands after blowing our noses without worry. At least we could grieve without worrying about the lengths of our hugs, the depth of our kisses, and the places we sat. At least, in the middle of earthquakes and a growing pandemic, we had that. We had that with her.
As the world grows in outrage over the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the countless other Black people US and other countries’ police officers brutalize, we, in Las Vegas, are grieving the loss of a son, of a brother, of a long-time friend. The funeral home insists we wear masks. While there, we do. As grandmothers, aunts, and cousins fly in because the airports were, at the time, trying to reopen, the weight of the grief is too strong to remember. As children who can’t read bear witness to the laughter, exhaustion, and tears of the grown ups around them, the reminders of masks, while absolutely necessary, are completely exhausting.
The hugs, the laughter, the shoulder leaning, the hand holding, the head smoothing are that much more important. Especially in light of the frailty of Black life in a world that is anxious to respond in kind. My girlfriend doesn’t want to know how I write about this because it’s hard enough to live it. Between the homeless Black youth hanging themselves, the growing news of unarmed, innocent Black people murdered by the police, my girlfriend acknowledges the importance of giving voice to the continued anxiety whites feel in coming into contact with Black grief. .
In the midst of other projects and demands, grief has been the driving force bringing me into contact with pen and paper/keyboard and screen. Grief is what we face everyday, whether because of the children who can’t play as much as they need or the adults struggling to make ends meet or the families not knowing when they’ll be able to hold one another again. We take the risk because, before the civil unrests across the world, we understood the precarity and fragility of Black life across states and institutions which we contact daily.
For example, a fellow radiation patient, in the midst of consuming news, wants to start a conversation about how universal health care would negatively affect access to health care for people like her. She starts this conversation because, earlier in our treatment, I disclose that I am a professor of Gender Studies. She approaches me because she knows that because of what I teach, I’m invested in these kinds of issues. I tell her that if medical school were less expensive then maybe we would have more doctors. Nevada has health care professional shortages. What I don’t tell her—is that people who look like me struggle to come to the doctor because people who look like her constantly remind them that they’re threatening the little she has.
My girlfriend insists I write on grief because, even as we come into contact with people who share our grief, we are still doing the work of deciding how much of our color—our race—our community’s struggles can be or should be seen. Burying my grandmother, we kept her from them because of what my grandmother didn’t want my grandfather to see. Burying her brother, we feared how people who didn’t know about me being her girlfriend would respond to me. In the midst of all this grief, we continue to struggle with the repercussions of what people see.
When another Latina started treatment, I wanted to make sure she and her family saw me. In the midst of talking about the toll on teachers and students, I corrected her and explained that I don’t teach in the Clark County School District, I teach at the university. After weeks of being the only one, days of having to see the president who gave my grandmother’s island, Puerto Rico, paper towels set limits on quarantine, I needed someone who looked like me to see all of me.
My girlfriend struggles with being seen, especially in grief, needing the calls she won’t ask for, the messages that accidentally come through me. It’s not a privilege Black people have, to be seen and loved and consoled in grief. I didn’t think it was a privilege until I put together the points of contact with grief and struggle this year, this year made no easier with the way quarantine kept us from hugging and holding and laughing and playing with others. And then the weight of the grief was too much. An advocate of wearing masks, sanitizing surfaces, and social distancing, in the midst of grief, we opted to be seen, to be touched, and held. Any other choice would have been another risk of life, a risk we take every day.
Between the injustices in the way and the conditions under which our loved ones die and the exhaustion and isolation we feel in being one of a few in recovery, we can’t not come into contact with contempt. But, at the very least, we can be weary and, in being weary, forgetful. And, in that temporary forgetting, let grief be the reason people choose to contact us.
Erika Gisela Abad, Ph.D has been a full time assistant professor teaching for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies Department since 2016. Her work has been published in Sounding Out, Centro Voices, Latinx (Mujeres) Talk, and In Media Res A Media Commons Project, Spectrum, and Gay Vegas. She recently guest edited Sinister Wisdom (117) titled “Lesbians in the City.” You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @prof_eabad.
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