In October, my one of my closest friends died by suicide. The days after their death were jarring & bewildering. I carefully tried to drink water—only to involuntarily spit it up while sobbing. I tried to eat—only able to eat soup and beans (to my horror, the hot Funyuns a friend offered made me nauseous.) I tried to walk, to listen, to breathe, but each moment was saturated with memories—my friend’s tender love for ginger beer, their voice as we sang Lauryn Hill at a party, their small smile in falling sunlight.

As I slowly regained energy, I was soon able to ground these startling reactions in common knowledge on grief (read: Psychology Today articles.) I learned a sudden loss of appetite was normal. I learned about the “grief spasms” that left me disoriented and exhausted.

Still, this societal understanding felt half-empty.

As my friend & I were both queer, Black, nonbinary, and living with suicidal depression, our pain of existing was & is deeply intersectional. However, in the lay constructs of grief I explored, I couldn’t feel a space for the incredible depth of that pain.

In light of this, I centered my processing around a radical question: What does intersectional grief look like in my body? When my depressive reality echoes a blood-filled indictment: “A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect?” When my mourning becomes a genderqueer brown body suspended in soap water & gospel?

More Radical Reads: 7 Ways to Support Someone Who May be Suicidal

As I grieved, my question rung in silence. It tremored through the racialized poverty denying my friend the consistent medication, therapy & self-discovery they sought. It sunk deep—into the salt waters of systemic & intergenerational trauma our black bodies have not forgotten.

In this silence, I learned “there is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to explore, forbidden to question or to know.” In this sorrowful reflection, Alice Walker gives voice to a construct known in suicide literature as “thwarted belongingness,” or “the extent to which individuals believe their need to belong is met or unmet.” As the space for this special, deep, & intersectional grief is ignored, a sense of thwarted belongingness can impact one’s capacity to hope, to live with pain, & to exist in this world.

As I hold space for this grief, my fledgling hope is able to dream another question: What does intersectional growth look like in my body?

In an intimate reflection on religion, Shug from The Color Purple affirms, “I believe God is everything. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be.” As an emerging teenager, I dipped my spirit in this transcendental thought. And in this season of sorrow, I find solace in it—I belong to my ancestors’ daydreams, to a quiet breeze on my skin, to Afrofuturist thoughts of existence & being. Within this belonging, I find imaginative hope—I sit with my selves in the moments of their deepest trauma, telling them that, despite the pain, my present looks like the salvation they cannot bear to imagine.

More Radical Reads: 6 Ways to Talk to Your Kid About Suicide

And, in the midst of this, a tentative narrative of grief & growing emerges. For now, nurturing a sense of expansive belongingness and radical imagination allows me to breathe the air above this deep pain. It makes existing bittersweet, yet perhaps, possible.

[Featured Image: A photo of a person with shoulder length dark hair.  They are looking upward and to the left. They are wearing purple cloth over their chest and round earrings. Source: Bill Gracey]