Stevie and the Goodbye Summer

As I play Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer, I am faced with a reality that feels like the last three months have been full of goodbyes. Sometimes I wonder if people think I’m making up how rough my life is. Then I realize pretty quickly that I do not have the luxury of wondering what people think because I have to do my life. It’s the only one I’m getting and there are simply too many great books to read to get hung up on weird stuff. There are simply too many great Stevie Wonder songs to stop hoping for better. So here I am. Trying to soak in all the best songs, read good books and be a better human. Against a tide of sad incidents in such rapid fire order that they felt like one long week or weekend.

The summer started with my family mourning the death (murder, actually, by gun violence) of my nephew. He had just turned 18 and I hadn’t seen him in way too long to be ready for a viewing or wake or whatever tf we call it when this Black life should matter but will never get the “justice for” hashtag he deserved. It felt like for colored girls who have considered how to scream in a funeral home when an RIP t-shirt was not enough. I didn’t scream. I barely believed it was him until I had to look my own children, his cousins, in their faces and wipe their tears. Then, I knew.

While my hands were still rubbing the salt of those tears into the grooves that seem to deepen each year, I planned to go south for an elder loved one’s birthday. As a young orphan, this is something that means a great deal. Elders are butterflies to me. All too fleeting and beautiful. A car crash and 2 days getting back home is what I ended up with on this trip. The details are unimportant. What is important is that I discovered a few things about goodbyes. Saying goodbye to a machine was easy. One day I’ll get another car. Saying goodbye to people who know to show you compassion…not so easy. Especially not when some people have absolutely no idea how to hold your heart in their hands. Where I expected grace and respect, I got contempt and callousness. And there as I left the scene where a person I loved made me feel like I didn’t matter, like my feelings didn’t matter, I said goodbye to expectations. The ability to let people be something other than what you expect of them is an absolute gift – a plant with a secret life.

The minute you think folks should be who you want them to be, you have already missed the point of being human. I said goodbye to this over the summer. And not without some real sadness but also not without the recognition that this is something I have desperately needed to do since my mother died. I have been locked into a place of expecting things from people for eight years now. I’m trading that in for awe when people are exceptional. (Shout out to the insurance folks who absolutely were…theeee kindest and most helpful people I could have asked for). And compassion when people catch that new flu going around like the plague – audacity (Shout out to my therapist and everybody keeping her in business – I adore her).

I said goodbye to my home of 12 years. It is a beautiful hundred year old cottage style craftsman or faux tudor, depending on who you ask. I loved the years when that home was new to me and I was new to a big family life. But lately I had been feeling nothing but emptiness and brokenness there. I felt like I was holding on to something filled with grief and sorrow. I needed to let go. At nearly midway through summer, I packed my man’s truck and headed back to the part of the city where my Pittsburgh journey began. I live in a 4 story walk up with lots of amazing humans and some pretty amazing pets. I love it here and everyday I think about how blessed I am to have a place I call home at all when so many people are struggling through the poverty only our society does so viciously against the backdrop of such fortune and excess. I said goodbye to ingratitude.

So now it is September and I have finally said goodbye to the blog hiatus I was on. I’m going to keep writing my book of hellos and goodbyes to share with anyone out there who cares. I’m going to keep reading amazing books like Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, Horsepower by Joy Priest, and Mama Said by Kristen Gentry. I’m going to ask for forgiveness for any time where I may not have been at my best. And I’m going to look forward to a fall where perhaps there will be less goodbyes.