Death and Spirituality

Death and Spirituality

By Marvin X

The only death is to be forgotten.—African proverb

Death is when we realize the power of spirituality and the impotence of materiality.

Suddenly we see clearly the life-force has departed and the body an empty shell, still, stiff, cold and soulless. Where did the soul go, we wonder, into the air, heaven, hell, where? Mythology and folklore is full of stories about death and the departed spirit.

My first experience with death was accompanying my father to funeral homes with flowers for the departed. Dad was a florist in Oakland and I'd often go with him to deliver flowers, sometimes I went along willingly or unwillingly. I wasn't particularly interested in placing flowers atop the coffins of dead Negroes. But he sometimes insisted I come inside with him, rather than stay in the car. He didn't say so, but I supposed he was trying to teach me a lesson about death, not to be afraid of it. For sure, I never got used to seeing those bodies laying there still, silent, cold, grey with makeup looking like a manikin.

Sometimes I would look and turn my head real fast, glad when Dad finished placing the flowers on the coffin or standing a bleeding heart of roses next to it. I had no personal attachment to the dead until grandmother died. Since I loved grandmother so much, her transition was absolutely crushing. Grandma's hands had meant the world to me and I was devastated when she passed while I was a teenager.

When grandpa died I was a young man and spoke at his funeral while a musician friend played the flute. After the funeral, my favorite cousin, Carol, made me promise to give her a similar funeral. I confess, I did not keep my promise to her because when she passed I was on drugs and too busy to attend her funeral.

Dealing with the deaths of Mom and Dad were nothing compared to the suicide of my son at 38 years old. Suffering manic-depression, they say he walked into a train. When my oldest son called me with the news, he said coldly, "Darrel is no more."

I was speechless. How could this be, my beautiful son who looked like me, walked like me, talked and laughed like me, so young, so bright, a world traveler and Fulbright scholar in Damascus, Syria, a grad student at Harvard. How could he be no more? I retreated deep within myself. My woman friend tried to make me talk but there were no words, just silence and total disbelief, even though I knew it was possible.

My pain was indescribable for he was more than my son, he was my friend, my critic, who promised he would preach my funeral, telling people about the real me, revealing my contradictions and every secret thing. But he was no more. A great spirit had departed. I was too shocked to understand why and how my son could do such a thing, so I pretended to deal with it as best I could. Inside I was horrified: how could God do this to me? I heard Job's wife say, "Why don't you curse God and die." I ignored her as Job did. But there was guilt, shame, a potpourri of emotions that lingered for months, years.

Yet I had to ultimately realize that spiritually, he had not nor would he ever leave me.

I had enjoyed him for 38 years in the physical, now I would enjoy him forever in the spiritual.

Rev. Cecil Williams taught us to accept the pain, enjoy the pain, don't medicate, don't deny, face the pain and turn it into joy, like the second line of a New Orleans funeral.

For all the mothers and fathers in the hood who have lost children—for all the parents who've lost children in the filthy capitalist wars of America, I salute you for enduring one day at a time. The spirit is greater than the physical, for we can see and feel the spiritual when we cannot see or feel the physical.

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Marvin X has given permission to Harvard University to publish his poem "For El Haji Rasul Taifa" from Love and War: Poems by Marvin X (1995). The poem will appear in The Encyclopedia of Islam in America Volume II, Greenwood Press, edited by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard's Islam in the West Program. Mr. X is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Muslim American Literature, University of Arkansas Press, edited by Dr. Mojah Khaf. He is also in the forthcoming Muslim American Drama, Temple University.

posted 23 June 2006