omo iya mi
(originally written April 14, 2024)
[Please note, this post touches on matters of death, and grief. This post is also a journey story. So, short it is not. But sweet, it is. This is word weaving.]
…Grief rearranges you...
Changes the composition of you.
The way you think.
The way one thought connects to another, and another thought connects to thoughts not even thought yet.
Grief changes the way you see, the way you breathe, the way you pick up the phone and listen to the way the person on the other end of the line is breathing. Is it smooth? Is it jagged? Is it hollow? Is it calm? Is it heavy?
There are moments in life captured through the lens of grief. Moments I wish I could shake the feeling of, not because I don’t want to remember, but because the memory still causes ripples. Ripples that make shock waves go through the body as if the moment is happening all over again. Then there are moments I can’t remember because grief has taken them. Stored them away for a rainy day, or a random morning when my heart is calm, breath is steady, and I am open and able to receive a memory that brings me back to a moment, a moment that creates a new ripple…
Question: what creates a ripple in water?
Answer: One way energy can move around is by forming waves. For example, the waves you see at the beach are formed by energy from the wind. Light and sound also move in waves, though we can't see that directly. And the ripples that you see in the river are small waves carrying away the energy from where you threw the rock. 1
Grief rearranges you…
June 4, 2017 my father died. We had been estranged for some time and for at least four to five years prior to his passing, he had been battling leukemia. The morning my mother came to deliver the news of his passing I knew something was wrong because not only had my sister come with her, but they walked through the front door in a peculiar way. Cautiously. My sister stood by the door almost as if to guard it and there was heaviness to my Mother’s usually quiet calm. Gently she ushered me over to the couch and guided me to sit down. The silence was anguished, sucking all the air out of the room. In hindsight, I remember feeling like I already knew what I didn’t know, and the parts of me that didn’t already know had just been waiting to find out.
What I can’t remember is what my mother said. There are few moments in life as staggering and emotionally deafening as the intersecting seconds just before, and immediately after, you learn someone you love has died. Losing my father leveled me in ways that are still fresh, still visceral, still tender. His passing didn’t just break me, it dismantled me. I became a kind of fragile I had never been before, and still am.
Grief rearranges you…
The day my father passed, was also the day I re-met my Uncle. My Father’s best friend. They met and grew up together in Lagos, Nigeria. I remember vividly walking into the hospice care center where my Father’s body was being kept cool for me. It was a four hour drive from Los Angeles to the hospice center. I walked in through the front door still dazed. After being greeted by the doctor, my Uncle was the first face I saw. For a second I was stunned because I thought it was him. In that moment, my Uncle, with his round face, chocolate skin, expressive eyes, and locs, looked like him. I don’t know what happened between that moment and the moment I found myself looking down at my father, still in his bed. I placed a palm against his now cold and clammy cheek, and swore I saw his chest rise. I know I saw his chest rise. The moments that followed were filled with the tears and breathless cries of a child saying, for the last time, hello and goodbye.
Grief rearranges you…
This year, June 2024, marks 7 years since his transition. I understand now why the word transition is used when talking about those who have passed on. I now know how someone can be gone, and still be here. Like Grandpapa, my Mother’s Father, I feel my Father’s presence in so many ways. Earlier this year in April, April 10th to be exact, I’d woken up extremely earlier. I don’t think my mind ever went to sleep the night before. For weeks I hadn’t been sleeping well, some nights I barely sleep at all. I moved from the bedroom to the living room thinking I’d read or meditate. Sometimes they are one in the same. I looked down and saw a book sitting on the bottom ledge of the coffee table washed in a stream of soft morning light. This book, ‘I can’t stand to see you cry’ is a photo book by visual artist and educator, Rahim Fortune. The book’s cover is reminiscent of the photo that introduced me to Fortune’s work.
Image: Rahim Fortune, January 24, 2021, New York Times, ‘At Home’
In 2021, a friend reposted a cover image from the Sunday, January 24, 2021, New York Times, ‘At Home’ Section.
“The theme [of the photo] was intimacy, after nearly 5 months spent apart during the first year of our relationship due to a pandemic and my fathers illness. To me this photo represents the immeasurable dark year we just lived through and the toll it took on love and intimacy.
Hold the ones you love close.” – Rahim Fortune
Grief teaches you…
Despite its intensity and severity, I do not believe that grief comes with ill intention. Grief does not come to make shells of us, to hold us hostage, and rob us of our light and joy.
Grief is not an enemy, but for a period after my Father transitioned, I considered it as such. It was me, and grief in the ring, battling it out, round, after round, after round. I felt I had to fight it, defeat it, overcome it, and forget it. I still do not know if grief is something you ever get past. I have written in one of my journals that, “grief is what stays once the haze of mourning melts away”. In my writing I also use the light of morning as a metaphor for the eye opening heaviness of mourning.
My Mother says, “For some loss the grief never goes away, never dissipates. Instead it transmutes, changes form, and changes you.”
Omo Iya Mi.
I am always changing, but grief has by far been one of the most significant causes of this changing affect. On the day of my Father’s passing, the re-meeting of my Uncle, my father’s best friend, was the re-meeting of parts of me that have, for many years, been dormant. When it comes to this idea of who I am, it is less about who and more about whose. Lineage and heritage, who I come from, who they come from, and where they have been, mentally, emotionally, ineffably.
I am equal parts my Mother, Judy, and my Father, Idowu. Because I did not have the opportunity to grow up closely with him, I had not, until more recent years, been able to learn and know the pieces of me that are like him. I had also not had the opportunity to intimately know my Father’s culture and his ways of being informed by his culture and upbringing. Despite being raised in america, my Mother made sure to cultivate within me a deep understanding, reverence, and respect for Yoruba tradition, West African culture, and history.
My full name, aside from my first middle name, Isis, is distinctly Yoruba. Yoruba, like most West African nations, are extremely spiritual. I’d argue that this is the case for most African nations across the continent, and diaspora. It is also the case that family, village, and the interconnectedness of life, all life, human, earth and otherwise, is a corner stone of culture and society for Indigenous nations.
In 1996, Hillary Clinton co-opted the phrase, taken from an African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”, and used it for the title of her first book, ‘It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us’. We know from america’s history, the current state of politics, and Clinton’s stance on the multiple genocides taking place across the globe which this country has a hand in that Clinton’s belief in this proverb is in sentiment only.
…My Uncle is not my blood Uncle, but my Uncle is my Uncle because my Father is his Omo Iya Mi. Omo Iya Mi translates in english to, ‘child of my mother’. My Uncle is not my Father but because my Father is also my Uncle’s Mother’s child, I am my Uncle’s child. My Auntie, my Uncle’s wife, is not my Mother, but I am her child.
When my Father died, and I re-met my Uncle, this was the rebirthing of a relationship. A reestablishing of a bond that was never broken; the regeneration of a connective tissue that not only tethers blood family to blood family, one Mother’s child, to another Mother.
There is a story my Mother tells about me when I was very young. I approached a woman and began talking with her. I use talking very loosely as I believe I was only about two or three years old at the time. When my Mother found me in conversation with the woman she reminded me that I was not to talk to strangers. She says I explained to her that the woman was not a stranger because, I said, “But Mommy, she’s not a stranger. She’s somebodies Mommy.” To this day my Mother can’t help but laugh and admit, I had a point. This is a point I wish more of us would not only understand, but know, accept, and live in the spirit of.
Recently one weekend while running errands I had a moment which further brought this understanding into focus. As I was getting out of my car to go into the grocery store, a Father and his Son were exiting their own car, parked right next to mine. As I began walking across the parking lot, headed up to the store’s entrance, I hear the Father say, “Oh. Are you going to the store with her today?” I turn around to see the little boy — his name is Marco and he is 2 — running up to me, his little arm and tiny hand outstretched, reaching to grab a hold of mine. The Father looks from his Son to me, smiling, and that is permission enough for me. I stretch out my hand to meet his, and Marco and I proceed walking hand-in-hand, through the store entrance, picking up a basket along the way. Marco and I continue up the first isle together before he lets go of my hand to go in search of “ice cream”. He has been repeating “ice cream, ice cream, ice cream” since we grasped hands in the parking lot. When I reach the refrigerated food section, with the milk and yogurt (the yogurt is his “ice cream”), I see him again, jumping around excited to have found his “ice cream”. This is what he calls yogurt. Marco comes bouncing over to me, and his Father realizes he forgot his wallet in the car. There is an agreement via an exchange of glances where in he and I know it is safe for Marco to stay with me. Marco barely notices, and we proceed to explore the flavors of “ice cream”. His Father, whom Marco calls Dada, returns and Marco, now fully excited, satisfied, and finished with his grocery shopping, gives me a full body wave “bye! bye!”, because his hands, and arms, are full with his selection of “ice cream”. Marco’s Father smiles, wishes me a beautiful Sunday and I, being me, stand in front of the refrigerator section promising to myself not to cry. Of course I do, and these tear, are tears of love and joy.
Adedayo.
One of my middle names is, Adedayo or, if written with the correct accents, Adédayọ̀. It means, ‘the crown or royalty became joyful’. My full first name, ẸniafẹBiafẹ meaning ‘the one to be loved like the wind/air.’
“Pay attention to what sits inside of yourself and watches you.” — Lucille Clifton
For the last several years, grief is what sits inside, and watches me. Joy is also there. And always, there is Love. “Love is a type of generational wealth we don’t talk nearly enough about.” (Kevin Miles) Love is the beginning and ending of all things. Love is both the medicine, the weapon, and the salve/solve. Love burns bridges often to create paths. Love is our only protection against heartlessness, soullessness, darkness, evil, and hate. Love is what remains when there is nothing else left. I am Love. You are Love. Children who then grow up to be adults are love.
Are we loving ourselves?
Are we loving our children?
Are we loving the children of other mothers?
…Rememory.
Catching the light as it streamed through the window and washed over the cover of Rahim Fortune’s ‘I Can’t Stand To See You Cry’, is what triggered this series of rememory. Rememory is what Toni Morrison describes as, “recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past”. With this course of remembering, I went searching through a folder of saved emails between my Father and I. In this folder I came across an email dated April 10, 2010. The email reads,
Dear Bia,
how are you, and how is your weekend coming along so far. you probably wonder who is that. well, it’s you, it’s one of the names that i also call you sometimes when i talk about you to my friends. It came from the long names of great meanings that i named you. It is short form of the name “Biafe” which means like the “Wind” or “Air”, an element without which one cannot exist.
Another email, within the collection of saved correspondence between my Father and I, includes these words,
“If hearts can be pure, my love for you would have come from the purest.” — Idowu Adewale
…Thank you for taking this journey with me.
– ei