Season's Greetings!
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| Photo Credit: Pixabay |
Kwanzaa starts today and lasts for seven days. Each day is dedicated to one of the following principles:
1. Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
2. Kujichagulia (Self-determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
3. Ujima (Collective work and responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems and to solve them together.
4. Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
5. Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
6. Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
7. Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
From this insightful video, I noted in my journal that:
Creativity doesn't ease pain; what it does is give pain somewhere to breathe, somewhere to rest, somewhere to become something else. Your brain is primed to form deep memories during the holidays.
The season activates emotional circuits, such as nostalgia and longing, as well as joy and grief. Sensory memory, smells, lights, textures, songs, ritual and repetition centres. This combination creates the perfect environment for emotional encoding, the process that turns moments into lifelong memories. Which means that whatever you create intentionally during the holidays echoes louder and embeds deeper than almost anything you create in a normal week.
A single meaningful moment now becomes a memory next year, a tradition a few years later, a part of your identity a decade from now. Your future self remembers what you make space for now. — Carlos Martinez
Letters for Adrian: Umoja (Unity)
So, in this second Letters for Adrian post, I'm starting by remembering what happened when I shared the first post on 19/12/24 with friends and family. The reaction was such a spiritually and emotionally uplifting one, judging by the comments that were received. And it felt as if Adrian's life was honoured in a way I had not experienced in quite that kind of dimension.
While in the process of sharing the first Letters for Adrian love story, I wanted to make sure to include Adrian's cousin Conrad Williams, as they were good friends.
I first met Conrad when he came to visit Adrian and me the week that our son Andrew was born. When I searched for Conrad's email address on his Facebook page, I was saddened and shocked to discover that he had passed away in 2024 and that an additional RIP Facebook group page had been set up.
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| Conrad Williams (1967-2024) Adrian Chambers (1963-1988) |
Thankfully, Conrad's RIP page had contact details of one of his secondary school pupils, Elle Esi, who had posted a reminder of a memorial service that was held in December, which I had sadly missed. I would have loved to go and pay my respects. Adrian's brother, Patrick Chambers, aka Bunny, did attend, and so he filled me in when he rang me in response to my sharing of the first Letters for Adrian.
Eleanor and I spoke at great length about Conrad, who studied at Cambridge University and at University College London, especially because he was her chemistry teacher and was very popular with many of his pupils. Conrad was also a brilliant photographer. His Flickr page is full of hundreds of stunning images.
Rituals, an African Perspective:
Within traditional African cultures, life doesn't end with death, but rather progresses into another realm. When it comes to an African perspective on death, I like the idea of death being a continuation, a transition into the afterlife, as opposed to death being seen as the end of life. That way, death isn't othered or decontextualised from life in the same way that it is done historically in Western traditional thought. Notions of 'life' and 'death' aren't caught up in an absolute, opposing binary.
This year was one where I brought a ritual into Adrian's anniversary of his passing on 8 December. I found that, rather than not having a specific idea of how to honour his anniversary, having a ritual provided a form and structure that worked really well. The difference this year was that I also shared the anniversary ritual with a few close friends and family, rather than keeping this to myself.
My ritual on that day included looking through my Family Life Book, completed this year —a space for archived photographs from 1980 to 1988, inspired by African American artist Kerry James Marshall, who has stated in his YouTube video talks that 'One of the things you see least often are expressions of love between two Black figures.' I lit candles, burned incense, and did a libation of water. I also listened to Adrian's favourite music — Run DMC, Public Enemy No. 1, Michael Jackson and Earth, Wind, and Fire. This was one of the most soulful and spiritually uplifting anniversaries.
So, grief doesn't need to be this lonely, solitary process. It is one that we can bring into our own contextual framework and make sense of it in order to allow for an approach towards death that's based on foresight, community, and holistic health.
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