Unfinished Business

As a child growing up, I don’t remember hearing about many people dying. Maybe my mom was protecting me from hearing about death or maybe it was truly the fact that few people in my world were really dying… In fact, our family unit (immediate and extended) stayed pretty much in tact throughout my childhood from what I can remember with only additions being made to our family bottom line….no subtractions… And then, I got older…

These days it feels like all I hear about is death around me….either someone in my immediate family, a close family friend, or in my ‘entertainment world family’…you know, my “Aunty” Whitney [Houston] or my ‘ex husband’ Tupac, etc… It just feels like I am constantly hearing about someone dying and the news always both saddens and frightens me…

My first ‘real’ experience with death was when a boy in my Young Marine group drowned… I can remember attending his wake in my Young Marine uniform and looking over the edge of his casket into his young face laying there…looking as if he was just peacefully asleep… Right there at the edge of his casket, I began to cry uncontrollably…so much so that people began to inquire if he was my brother or best friend or some other person close to me because there had to be some justification for why I was so inconsolable… But the truth was he was none of those things to me…it was just that for the first time, I came face to face (literally) with death…and as my mother whisked me away out of the church (I really was causing a scene), I just remember thinking about the permanency of death… We would never hear his voice again, we would never see him walk into a room or know what he would have done with his life or meet his children… For the first time it made me think of the fact that one day I too, would no longer be here…

Fast forward several years and in 1998, my freshman year in college, I lost my grandmother… I still remember the early morning phone call, my mother asking me to hand the phone to my friend Kimberly, my mom explaining to her what happened so that she could console me as my mother then explained it to me… Flying out of Tallahassee which was under a hurricane watch…sitting on a little “crop duster” airplane that was being pushed to and fro by the hurricane level winds, listening to Lauryn Hill’s “Nothing Even Matters“…. The sick feeling I felt in the pit of my stomach…if I close my eyes now, I can still feel it…like being punched in the gut and having to grasp for breath… I remember walking into my grandmother’s house and feeling odd not seeing her sitting on the couch, not being there to greet me…the feeling was just so strange… Her death left a void in my heart… I felt guilty being in college and not there in her final days… I felt angry that she was no longer with us, angry at the people who had done her wrong over the years, angry at the situations in her life that changed the trajectory of what she could have become…angry at the dream stealers that she had encountered along the way…. I just wanted her back…I didn’t want her to be gone… Not even the tattoo on my back bearing her initials could fill the void of the day we lost our matriarch…

Since then I have lost Uncles, friends, cousins, my Godmother, my Grandfather, my Father, etc….and my experience with and feelings about death never get any easier… I’m never at ‘peace’ with the loss…and I never could quite put into words why until I heard a phrase that summed it up at the funeral I attended today… In the funeral I went to today, the sister of the deceased stood up and in her ‘farewell’ message to her brother she said “…brother, I’m so sorry you had to go when we had so much unfinished business…” Those two words sum up a common thread in every death that I have had to come to grips with… Unfinished.Business. Whether it is something that the person has left unsaid or undone or whether there was something that I should have said or done to them or for them, in every death, it always feels like there is unfinished business… My grandfather died at the age of 100 and even at that age, he was such a fighter…he would often talk to me and reflect on his life and the things that could have been different….his Unfinished.Business. My Godmother worked until the day she took sick…even though she was eligible to retire, she continued to work day in and day out, even working two jobs sometimes….and when my Godmother took sick, I visited her at her home and as I sat at her bedside she cried to me and said “I don’t want to die…I don’t want to go”…she passed away less than a week later…she passed away having never drawn not one day of her retirement…..Unfinished.Business. My cousin wanted to be a Marine, but with the country in the midst of several wars, he decided to defer that dream… A woman’s lie and a night in jail further changed the trajectory of his path… His always cheerful, always joking personality hiding his inside wounds of feeling inadequate or unworthy and one day he shot and killed himself…Unfinished.Business….

Unfinished.Business…it drives our day to day lives… Our never-ending to do list…our bucket list…our ‘wait-til-I-get-my-money-right’ list….it just never seems to end….I guess, until we do…. So as I sit here in my ‘don’t-wear-black-to-the-funeral’ dress, coming from laying another friend/loved one to rest, once again fighting back that queasy feeling that comes whenever I think about the day that I will no longer walk this earth….as I sit here fighting back tears… I just want to say that you and I need to be about the business of ‘finishing’ our Unfinished.Business… Whether it’s a phone call to a friend that we haven’t spoken to in years, or getting out there and finding love, or starting that new business, or getting back into church or whatever your Unfinished.Business. is…you have to get to it…because I don’t think Mr Preston woke up last Friday thinking that it would be his last day on earth… I don’t think my friend Malcolm went to a concert thinking that he was going to be shot in his back that night… I don’t think my grandmother thought that her last trip to the hospital was going to be her last… A thief in the night…that’s how they say death comes…and when it comes, please don’t let death catch you with Unfinished.Business.