i have lines of grief etched so deeply across my face... god, strike me down if i am ever found guilty of being incompassionate! there are narratives, dialogues of mourning being spoken everywhere: in iraq, texas, nigeria. i know it, i know the vernacular of pain, the plasma of tears, and it priviledges me. it priviledges me so! how inhuman to be unable to understand loss.

my uncle benjamin ezie passed away on sunday. he was 36, my dad's younger brother. looked like wesley snipes, drove a black mercedes, loved me and my sisters hard. addressed us like peers, friends, rather than childern. 2 months ago he tried to visit me at yale. we spoke on the phone several times, he told me he loved me, that he was proud. we said that we would see one another next trip.

he died at 36 of renal failure. i wonder if he died even knowing what felled him. the doctors did not diagnose it. kidneys remind me of a bad moon, a severe cresent, a toxic job, toxic disposition. my uncle is the third person i know whom they have betrayed.

i could reference all sorts of things. i could talk about how hes only been married three years and never had the chance to produce a child. i could talk about the voice mails that i recall, his voice bursting with a warmth that i even felt undue. how do you pay homage to a man, how to remember him, enbalm him with words? i don't know, i could probably never do it justice. i think i am going to write him a letter, however ... something that can be read as my father buries him in the obi, two generations of ezies interred.

at a panel on iraq today, one of the lectures said that in the 13th century Baghdad was destroyed by the mongols. more than 100,000 thousand people were slaughtered. it made we wonder if there is more compassion involved in killing entire families than leaving people behind to grieve. i traced that to myself; what if mourning was done away with, what if there was "palliative care" for the bereaved? my mother said to me today that if one of her children died, she would jump off a bridge.

if we could measure the reverberations that one life makes, the number of people who would have to leap off bridges to starve off grief, how long till our waterways would clog? it is a dominio theory: i grieve you, she grieves me, they grieve her; how quickly the world would be incapacitated with sorrow! an endless network of suffering, i imagine the whole world would unwind itself through the six degrees of separation. how profoundly sad it would be to be that last person left unaffected, standing alone on a world, with no one to weep for.

i don't know. i still do not understand death. i sometimes force myself to think that perhaps its not the worst thing. one just ceases to exist. ceases. nothing. no feeling. not bad, neutral even. just your histories behind, legaices untold. the narratives of grief, the reverberations.