Black Grief and Healing: Why We Need to Talk About Health Inequality, Trauma and Loss

Excerpt 1:

My Jamaican Experiences of Death

by Yvonne Witter

Yvonne is an award-winning speaker, author, and enterprise consultant. She has spent over 20 years guiding people across six continents toward their potential. Her passion is in turning ideas into credible and sustainable businesses, and she has worked with various individuals and teams of people to make this happen. Yvonne would describe herself as a conscious practitioner, a solutionist. She is a published author of fiction and nonfiction. She loves traveling for experiences of new cultures, creative arts, writing, food, and good conversation.

Death Rituals

The first time I became aware of death rituals was when my grandmother passed and I attended my first funeral. In those days as a child your head had to be covered for church—if not a hat, then a lace mantilla—and black, purple, or white were the only colours worn to funerals. Conservative dresses and men in suits or white shirts and black pants—definitely no garish colours. 

Before that I didn’t quite understand the death rituals, but I was inquisitive and would listen to conversations. I notice tape measures hanging over doors at people’s houses and overheard women talking about “fixing” the widow so that the dead husband would not come back to “trouble” her. I found out that when a husband dies, the widow will often sleep in red underwear, or tie a red string or tape measure around her waist to ward off the dead man’s duppy (ghost), which may want to have sex with her in her sleep. It seems to me that most of the rituals were all about not raising the dead, ensuring that the spirit was resting.

Funerals, like weddings, were a time of big family gatherings. Relatives would come from abroad, and in our family they came from England, Canada, and the USA. There would be a full house sometimes, with children too, so I had cousins to play with, I got gifts, and generally there was an atmosphere of unity, but sometimes there were quarrels and conflict too. I was so young I didn’t know what the adults quarrelled about, and frankly, I was not interested. I just liked to see the “foreigners” arrive to stay in our homes and receive nice gifts, usually clothing, shoes or trinkets. 

Traditionally in Jamaica some people gather every night for nine nights after a person has passed for the “wake,” lighting a lamp to show that the spirit of the deceased is still in the home; others only celebrate on the ninth night. But no matter how it is done, the Nine Nights celebrations are a cornerstone of most Jamaican funerals, and are an example of blending of Christianity and Traditional African beliefs. 

We also had the Nine Night celebration when my grandmother passed, and people came to the house every evening for nine nights after she passed. They stayed well into the night drinking rum, playing dominoes and reflecting on the life and times of my grandmother. Some people just came for the socialising, but the tradition is that if the “yard” is left empty, it is not a good sign because visitors are an indication of love and support for the deceased and the family. In communities where there is not much entertainment, the Nine Night celebrations provide a place to go. It is something social to do and the chance to enjoy drumming or guitar playing that might happen. As we were seen as newly arrived from England, the locals attending the nine nights were expecting quite a lot of food, and my father certainly delivered.

Excerpt 2:

A Multitude of Grief: Willelmina’s Story

by Willelmina Joseph-Loewenthal

Willelmina Joseph-Loewenthal is an African Caribbean lady of mature years who lives in London. Willelmina has been writing poetry, flash fiction, and short stories for several years. In her day job, Willelmina is a mental health peer trainer in a National Health Service Recovery and Wellbeing College, working with people who sometimes experience severe and complex mental health difficulties. Having lived experience of mental health difficulties herself, she facilitates this training. 

George Floyd 

I suppose my experience of public grieving began on 25th May 2020 with the death of George Floyd in the USA, and the trauma of watching him being murdered. As that nine minutes and forty-six seconds sucked away his life, it drained some of my life force, and now I am not the same person. I know this because just thinking about that awful scene makes tears well up in my eyes. How many other people have experienced this? His death threw me into a melancholy that had nothing to do with my mental health diagnosis—it was the result of seeing something that I should not have seen.

In the end it became unnecessary to watch it again and again on screen because it played over and over in my head. The shock and sorrow of George Floyd’s death scene changed our relationship, and he became my brother or my son. I was watching the death of a loved one, and at that point, the grieving became personal, and I was bereaved, just like the countless millions of Black and woke people in the world, but I was doubly bereaved.