GUEST POST
By COURTNEY B. COOK
Austin, TX. Whitesburg, KY. Pittsburgh, PA. New Orleans, LA. Atlanta, GA. Charleston, SC. These are the cities I’ve carried my grief. It found me in a pasture alone, stole my voice harmonizing on a porch with friends, shut me away from an academic conference with strangers. I never knew how demanding, incoherent, and isolating grief could feel until I learned my dad was dying. If nothing else, this slow walk toward death alongside my dad has been filled with lessons. He’s always taught me to be on the lookout for lessons hiding in the everyday. For the past three months, I’ve been forced to collect lessons and wonder about our capacities to show up for one another in the most treacherous human moments.
The best times I’ve shared with dad would, to many, seem too filled with the mundane to live in the sacred. When I was young, we had a farm with a pecan orchard and 100 cows. There, Daddy taught me how to care for creatures big and small, how to listen to the river, and how to create joy out of a stick and still-wet cow shit. Those lessons were about finding fullness among an atmosphere of nothingness. Out of nothing, atop a hay bale, I learned to befriend imagination and desire. Nothingness formed a foundation for an entire life.
As this precarious year continues without the promise of relief, I’m thinking on the textures of grief and loss – how pain can be simultaneously far-reaching and so acute it’s sharp edges of memory belong only to me. Reflecting on change as a daughter losing her father, an adult losing her dearest friend, and a teacher who wonders what justice wants, I’m confronted by the lessons my dad has made possible: that out of nothingness, despair, survival, we can create what we desire.
At six, my dad was running moonshine; at seven he was leading a mule to plow, picking cotton alongside his mama; and as his children have been told time and time again he sold his first car when he was fourteen. He didn’t finish high school, but went on to own three car dealerships in the small Georgia town where I was raised. Through his hard laboring, lessons-learned, and desire for imagining better, I was granted nothing short of an entire life.
When I was eight, Dad taught me to drive out of necessity. Stranded in the pasture, despite my desire to be grown, I cried as my tiptoes grazed the pedals. Recognizing my fear, he coached me: push the brake, shift the truck into drive, press gently on the gas. After reviving the four-wheeler, he let me drive alone until sunset. Holding this memory now, knowing he isn’t long for this Earth, I feel the heaviness of a world vanishing as so many others must learn to drive out of necessity. I wonder if I’m up for this and worry whether I’ll be able to shift the thing into drive without a chat beforehand or him reminding me that I don’t really have a choice.
Imminent loss is terrifying and too frequently we are made to feel that we must struggle alone, bear it away, minimize its painful parts, despite the non-negotiable commonness of grief. This past year has amplified my desire for more open and humanizing approaches to loss; to consider grief as a source of strength that might lead us towards, rather than away from, community. If we are to continue living through political uncertainty, if I have to fall apart, what I desire for us – for me – are gentle places to land.
To speak of gentleness conjures its mythical counterpart: toughness. I’d been taught toughness from the time I was old enough to recognize grown folks’ messiness. In a recent chat, I said to dad that I think we got it wrong. Toughness isn’t about hardening your heart, pretending in that sticky southern way that “everything’s fine.” Being tough, I told him, is asking for help when we need it, saying this is hard, remaining open to tenderness. My desire for the next chapter is that somewhere amidst surviving, toughness might emerge as learning to tenderly be with one another with sturdier love; holding space for storied pasts, ancestors’ wisdom, to hold us in collective grace, and remain alive as common teachers.
To live in a gentler world has remained a guidepost for me. It’s helped me recognize emergent love in unremarkable moments, be inspired by those who haven’t feared my grief, and access compassion. When Dad realizes aloud “I’m not ready to leave my family,” my heart heaves and I know my pain is inseparable from all the other suffering in this world. From a broken heart emerges a desire to create more gentle moments for him, for others, and for myself that keeps us on the lookout for lessons.
I’d like to remember that I can drive alone and, eventually, learn to relish the experience, treasure independence, but that I don’t have to. For now, I want to continue learning from his humor and lightness, when the world, our small and sacred world, is threatening to end too soon; and when the larger world accumulates new threats daily. I’m scared, incapable of imagining life without him, but I know if I told him, he’d shoot me straight, point to the realities surrounding us, and throw the necessity of holding fast to the wheel and easing my foot onto the gas into relief.
Courtney Cook is a Georgia-born educator, activist, and artist living in Austin, Texas. She is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Texas, Austin, a poet-in-transience with Typewriter Rodeo, and curator of the secularly-sacred music and poetry listening series, Sunset Sessions. Her thinkings and poems have been published with Teaching Tolerance and The Eco-Theo Review.
