RowVaughn Wells arrived at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis on a gray, cold Wednesday to say goodbye to her son Tire Nichols. He was dead. Murdered. Beaten to death by local police officers while shouting for her, a hundred yards from home.
Across the street, in front of the church, there was a crowd of journalists. Secret Service agents guarded the entrance. The shrine was filled with dignitaries, including Vice President Kamala Harris.
Wells entered the church under the spotlight of TV cameras pointing down from the balcony. As he approached the pulpit of the church and the black coffin surrounded by white flowers, he began to shake his head and try not to cry.
Her pain and grief did not belong to her. They could not be isolated from the political drama in which she found herself plunged and by which she was captured.
The Rev. J. Lawrence Turner began the ceremony by saying, “This family is bearing the unwanted, unearned, illogical, unjustifiable, and enormous burden of mourning their loved one while also fighting for justice.”
An idea sticks in my head about this case and those that preceded it. Not only is the loss the family has suffered overwhelming, but their ability to grieve that loss has been altered and stopped, converted into politics and representation. Privacy is out of reach.
As one local activist, Hunter Demster, told me, Nichols’s relatives endured “a vigil, after a protest, after a press meeting, after interviews with journalists.” Though he didn’t say it in so many words, he didn’t think the family had even a moment to sit down and cry.
Grieving appropriately, slowly and, if need be, chaotic should not be a luxury. It’s the least any of us deserve when tragedy befalls our families.
Just before Tire Nichols’s funeral began, Collette Flanagan—leader of Mothers Against Police Brutality—told me over the phone that when her son died, also at the hands of the defense forces, she said to herself: “You You’re going to have to keep this pain in a drawer, you’re going to have to put all your suffering and sadness aside, because you can’t keep quiet”.
Forcing these families to subdue their grief is a crime – a moral crime.
Grieving in public, over and over again, under and in front of spotlights and cameras, is not part of the normal grieving process. Many people can barely understand their own flood of emotions, let alone live with the pressure of being constantly asked to express these feelings in short, effective sentences.
But boldly, that’s exactly what families like Tire Nichols’s do. They “shelve” their personal grief to become leaders in mass, public grief. Instead of simply mourning their dead son, they publicly defend him. Without prior notice or preparation, they are recruited into a war in which the enemy is entrenched and their comrades under siege.
They give up, because we force them to, something that grief expert Joél Simone Maldonado has described as “the sacredness of grief”—sitting alone and silent with it, respecting the loss, and developing a ritual around it. Instead, families are forced to face what Maldonado describes as “performative grief”.
And, sad fact, the legions of families that do are growing.
At Tire Nichols’s funeral, I sat across from Donna Gates Bullard, who tapped me on the shoulder before Mass and told her her brother Michael Gates was also beaten to death by police in Memphis. He was killed in an operation called “Jump and Grab” in 1989, in which the police set up a trap to catch him. (It seems Memphis has no shortage of bad nicknames for crime-fighting efforts.)
Bullard said he attended the funeral to honor his brother. This is something I have seen many times: the pilgrimage of mothers or sisters of other dead to attend the funeral of the most recent victim. Their mourning is ongoing, the wound remains open.
During one of the musical interludes, I looked back to see Bullard in tears, with her hands over her chest as if she was trying to calm down.
These family members are constantly told that they need to stand strong in the name of their dead child. But what has become of the space for vulnerability? For human frailty? Where is the loophole so that they can confess their fatigue without being judged? Where is the space to simply be, when all you can do is open your mouth to cry or curse the heavens?
We have a model of a kind of perfect performance of mourning on the part of these women, a unique script that they must follow. They are forced to hone and professionalize grief, to replace mourning with speech, to respectfully receive an endless stream of condolences when all their soul asks for is silence.
I’ve seen this conflict firsthand in other mothers who have lost their children to violence and who have turned their grief into part of a cause. When I first personally interviewed Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, she was consumed and crippled with grief. Fulton brought his own mother to the interview. She laid her head on her shoulder as she spoke and wrapped her hands around his arm.
In 2015, when I spent the day with Sam DuBose’s family, his mother, Audrey, was so exhausted that she had to cling to me just to get out of the car and walk to where she was going to do a TV interview.
Audrey still gave an emotional interview when the spotlight was turned on and the camera started to roll. But after it was all over, she said to me, in a whisper, “I want to close my door, cover myself, and never open it again.”
When I interviewed Tamir Rice’s mother, Samaria, that same year, on the first anniversary of her son’s death, shot by a Cleveland police officer, one of the first things she said to me was, “I’m tired, I’m overwhelmed, and my only wish is to lie down”.
But she couldn’t lie down. That day, she needed to show up, receive hugs, give interviews and give a speech — things she did with conviction and ardor just a few meters from the place where her 12-year-old son’s blood had soaked the ground.
Not only do these women lose a part of their hearts when their children are murdered, the rest of their hearts are tied up in expectations and public discourse. Suffering is compounded.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
