I’m not afraid of Death, as Mexican I grew up celebrating it. Our beloved ones never actually leave us as we remember them. I normally don’t get upset when the internet shares news about a high-profile person passing. It’s part of life, I always reflect. I’m all about ‘The-Circle-Of-Life-Simba-Mufasa’ sort of vibe. Yet, yesterday for the first time, I found myself in a sea of grief. I did actually feel the loss of a stranger I’ve ever met. I did get touched by his art though. Black Panther gave me that hope about the future I didn’t feel since Obama became president. I feel hopeful that, perhaps in the near future, we’ll be able to see Anansi Boys as Neil Gaiman intended; with so many brilliant characters who do not need to be whitewashed.
As a new twitter user I immersed myself in so many different voices and felt their pain. People that actually met and shared their time with him and how a wonderful man he was. It resonated how he was diagnosed with cancer four years ago, four years ago Chadwick was roughly my current age. That is wild. I feel like I still need thousands of things to do. I’m not even sure, if I’m being told I’ve got cancer, if I could attempt any of those things, I’d probably be sad and afraid but he did do amazing things regardless. He kept his pain silent. He kept on inspiring generations of people, giving them hope, creating a platform we could only dream of.
I woke up in the middle of the night desperate to write this, to take it out of my chest. I can’t stop thinking how important the simplest and smallest acts of kindness are. You really do not know what a fellow human is going through, we really don’t. I read he was deleting some of his pictures because people criticised his appearance. It is so heartbreaking. In the big picture, I feel so insignificant at the moment, not at all a proper agent of change yet. My only solace has always been that I try to be nice. I am polite and caring. When I get on the bus, I smile at the driver, when I go to a restaurant I sometimes crack a joke to make my waiter smile, when I call an airline because they have cancelled my flight four times I talk nicely to the agent, he is just working and has nothing to do with pandemic chaos. It is so hard, Oh, I know. Sometimes it is so hard to be nice but then if I have nothing nice to say I just don’t say anything at all.
It’s cloudy in London, there’s an eerie silence around me, it might be me or it might be because it’s a Bank Holiday weekend. There’s silence nonetheless and as I reflect, my thoughts are with all those who mourn the loss of a loved one. But remember, when we lose someone close, they never properly leave; they live within us and as long as we remember them their memory lives on.
Gabriela Belard 