On grief and other maladies

What does grief feel like to you? On yet another day when browsing Twitter has taken over me and I sit possessed, my fingers forcing my timeline to refresh every second, I see that the Black Panther star has died. He had colon cancer. In a world where thousands are dying every day, death has lost its power. Yet the initial passing sorrow I feel starts to build as I scroll down and down into the depths of the social media platform.

Cancer lives in me rent-free but not in a form that shows up on test scans. It lies in wait like a sleeper cell for a spot in my mouth which looks different or swelling in my throat. Then it flares up in my thoughts and the flashbacks of those days start running in my head. The bloody mouth, the slurred speech, the months of pain are not just memories anymore. A badly made montage of the worst year of my life shifts inside me taking all my internal organs for a roller coaster ride. One moment they are in free fall, another they lie tied up at my lower abdomen with a thick rope of hope. The tests come back negative. The swelling is just the garden variety common cold. The spot in the mouth was just pepper.

I had never known Chadwick Boseman as I know him today scrolling mindlessly through the various twitter posts about him. As he crossed his arms in front of his chest and grunted “Wakanda Forever” he was fighting disease. He was kind and…