Rocks

It’s not new news that context changes almost everything. When I was young, authority figures seemed ancient as rocks, and hopefully contained within them the knowledge and wisdom that rocks have, just by virtue of having lived through Some Shit For Quite Some Time. (It took a little while but I soon realised wisdom was… sparse among grown ups.)

Now, in my 40s, and a parent, I sometimes find myself welling up when I see young Black men playing football on TV. Boys, really. Bukayo Saka’s winning smile messes me up. I don’t exactly disregard the well-paid, famous athlete but really, all I see is my kid, dimples winking, so small and defenceless against large Italian defenders, or a skinned knee, or other childhood horrors.

And another thing that seems different now: I synthesise death in a whole different brain lab now. I have more information. “Young” can be anything up to 65, now. Because yes, I know young 65-year-olds. When I hear a death announcement, I find myself wondering how many more years that person could’ve had, all other things being equal. I search for details about what they had been looking forward to, how much they had planned to still be here, what potential twists and turns life could maybe have handed to them. And with each answer, the heft of the blow of their death hits me afresh.

And this month, which is speeding by in a way I find uncomfortable for January, has landed blow after blow. In the moments after hearing about yet another death, I feel either like a pebble skipping across water i.e. briefly exempt from gravity, a feeling akin to being out of body, watching from above. Not light, exactly, but not quite real. Or, I feel like I have swallowed the largest, craggiest boulder, and after working it down my oesophagus — painfully, slowly, gasping all the while — it now sits in my belly, pulling me down, down, down into the earth, until I feel like the soil itself. This January’s deaths have left me feeling like the soil. I am underneath it all, dark and quiet. Some of the deaths have been personal, somebody I once physically touched, pressed cheeks against, laughed with. Dani. Others have been more distant, but tethered to me in some touchable, horrific way, still. The toddler son of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The midwife and Black maternal health advocate Dr Janell Green Smith. Renee Good. Keith Porter Jr. Deeper and deeper into the earth. Soil.

“Weathering” is a term that caught the attention of the public a decade or two ago, and then once more post-Covid. As with its geological namesake, it refers to an erosion, a deterioration, a gradual breaking down. Arline Geronimus—the public health researcher and professor who first defined and coined it as related to humans—described weathering as a chronic stress (caused by things like racism, poverty, and other societal discriminations) that “literally wears down your heart, your arteries, your neuroendocrine systems, ... all your body systems so that in effect, you become chronologically old at a young age.” It manifests in a multitude of ways, not least stealing years off of human lives. Weathering is more severe in low income individuals, and also in African Americans. You know, people who live in and under certain marginal conditions. I thought about weathering every single day of my pregnancy; at every midwife appointment, during my child’s birth, every single day of the fourth trimester. I wondered if thinking about weathering was weathering me even more. I tried not to think about weathering. I dreamt about weathering.

These deaths, of far too young people, had me thinking about weathering again. The hits bodies take over and over before the Big One. Of how we’re all trying to counteract weathering—whether we name it or not—by drinking green juices, and eating oily tinned fish, and doing mobility exercises, and lifting heavier (of course!), and doing the Spelling Bee every day and choosing sleep and redefining our relationship with inconvenience as we cling to and revel in community. Chasing away the worst ills of capitalism by literally loving each other and ourselves harder than we ever have before. And I applaud it all and keep massaging my hope—that most resilient of muscles—and try to do what I can to banish the darkest fears and focus on the brightest lights.

I am trying to do my work, show up for my people (especially when it’s kind of a personal nuisance to do so) cultivate joy, take my meds, stay present, laugh often, exercise my body and my mind, love all my lovers, forgive more, and request more forgiveness. It’s hard to do amidst the background weathering that I know is also taking place. I still always hear the wind howling, and the rain blasting down, eroding without care. I just bought some earplugs. I’m trying. I hope you are too.