I’m thinking of a (woman, highly regarded) Dr. at Duke casually saying @ my first appt, “most women work through chemo”. Thinking of how it was a “luxury” that I could take a semester off without any leave or benefits bc I was a lecturer but we had another income. https://twitter.com/foxxyglamkitty/status/1299582429389303808

Thinking of how Victor begged me to value my time doing nothing and said my time would be better spent petting our dog than trying to start an editing business while in treatment. I felt like I was costing so much $ w/o pulling my weight.

And how even though I “wasn’t working” or paid for work, I was, of course, still working, still writing and applying for a grant etc. Which continued a pattern of me feeling bad for not being able to work for one or another reason, while still working throughout.

Thinking of the one time I went to my regular yoga class bald and all these women who’d never talked to me felt the need to tell me about the person they knew who’d made it through cancer

Including a woman who made me stay after waiting while she scrolled through her phone to find a picture of her friend’s curly hair to prove she was doing well while on permanent intense treatment for the past three years, and working.

And then trying to multiply all this by the scope of Chadwick Boseman’s illness and “what he achieved despite it” and feeling wrecked.

Thinking of a class I took from the great Sherman James, who coined the term John Henryism as a description of the health toll of navigating racism through overwork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henryism

and thinking of my dad, who quit his job as soon as he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at 50 because he did not like his job and he wanted to die meaningfully. And that this too was a luxury, that he could stop working and die at home, one of the simplest things there is.

It makes me feel so sad thinking of the personal toll of the beautiful cultural/political collective moment that is Black Panther. What he pushed himself to do. He offered this wonderful thing to so many people but these choices aren’t made in a vacuum.

I wish I could be confident that Chadwick Boseman made these choices joyfully, as an artist, and not painfully, or under financial pressure, worried for his family, or feeling the weight of history on him to make something great. All these things can be true at once.

My dad switched gears to dying actively, for six months, as a whole process. This was an intense time and terrible but it was also very important to me. He was trying to be present for many people who had been part of his life & to understand, metaphysically, what was happening.

I guess I’d just hope that what people take from this is that this was a gift and also a sacrifice and we should ask ourselves why people feel gratified by these sacrifices, who people use to “ward off” the idea of cancer and dying, what they require as “success”

And ask how this fits into our larger culture that apparently tolerates mass death, that defiles and does not acknowledge it, that apparently *requires* mass death for the sake of the stock market

And of course it’s US white culture doing this, that has no real rituals for the dead any more, that is obsessed with death on TV and does not speak of real death in real life. People have had to harden themselves off to death to justify our health policy, our work conditions

Our gun laws, our prison system and police, our schools, our housing system, our military

I wouldn’t be surprised if white racists hating Rae in the Hunger Games were actually angry at Katniss’s rituals to acknowledge Rae’s death, covering her in flowers and doing this salute. Recognizing her life and her death. We don’t often see bodies treated lovingly

And now it is abundantly clear we are actually living inside the Hunger Games and many people have the same detached feeling toward death. Acknowledging and making time for death is the thread that unravels all the other commitments to life as we know it.

I want us to think about why dying at home or not earning money while being poisoned and cut into is a major luxury or exception in our country, and how this has informed our response to a terrible pandemic.