“I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” This quotation come from African American and Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. I copied it onto a piece of paper in 1985, when I first taught her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The paper is tattered and taped, fading, but still visible to me every day. It reminds me of my father and his two major affects—laughing and looking mean and impressive. When I found this quotation, I didn’t realize it captured my dad, but it does. It mirrors the ways that I have been writing about my father ever since I was a teen, struggling to understand and reconcile him, his largeness and its impact on my person and my life, the history that shaped him and that is still shaping me.

I spend more time in communication with my father now that he is dead then I did in the last several months of his life. He looms large for me again, like when I was a teen. I am in a stage of life that I did not expect to be in at 60 years old—who am I now, without my father’s living presence? All of you who have lost someone close to you, formative to who you are in fundamental ways, you understand already what I now am just beginning to feel: Our dead ones remain with us, and they continue to help us understand ourselves, who we are and who we want to be, long after they are gone.

In this season of the thinning veil, may you find solace in the love of your departed ones. May you freely share hard legacies and regrets with loving companions, including me, as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.

 

Blessings, Rev. Rita