“What does it mean to defend the dead?”

I’m tired of sitting with my rage.

Soothing it with temporary fixes when all it needs is fresh meat. '

An outlet for a generation’s worth of pain, anger, fear, and unbeing.

Social death is the condition of not being accepted as human.

It is the condition of being Black.

What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the need of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of living. Vigilance, too, because any- and everywhere we are, medical and other professionals treat Black patients differently: often they don’t listen to the concerns of patients and their families; they ration palliative medicine, or deny them access to it altogether. While there are multiple reasons for this (Stein 2007), experience and research tell us “‘people assume that, relative to whites, [B]lacks feel less pain because they have face more hardship.’ …Because they are believed to be less sensitive to pain, [B]lack people are forced to endure more pain.”

But I am here, aren’t I?

What then does it mean to live in hyper-visible silence?

All the while the rage grows with nowhere to go but inward,

burning holes in consciousness until there’s only a charred hollowness left.

Who can I hold safely in a burnt bosom?