Eight* dead in seven weeks.
*This essay discusses the nature of active, acute grief in my life by the title, “Seven dead in seven weeks.” At the time of writing, I did not know one of my grandmothers had passed away; she died on the sixth of October and I only found out two days ago. Thank you for the time you spent on this earth with me, Granny Magdalene. I love you very much.
Here‘s the audio. I usually write one version, read it, and then edit what I’ve written to match the audio version so that the written one is easier for you all to digest. In this case, I wrote what I wanted and only could bring myself to read it one time. The audio and the written essay are distinct and separate entities; I would recommend watching and listening to them both.
I, of course, am breathing. So I am thinking about Death.
I witness my loved ones die— far away. Upline. Never having met but somehow still close— the intimacy of their image flickering behind my eyelids. How much closer can we get… than the mucuos membrane of the irises? Maybe the irritated lining on my heart muscles, perpetually prone to stutter? I have not needed to keep track of the dead by counting on my fingers since those first few waves of Covid. What luxury I’ve enjoyed in my personal life to not have to keep track of fatalities by timelines, events, and numbers for a few straight, blissed out years.
Now (late October, 2025) I realize that I only know when I am grieving because I reach for my mental faculties and find patient, cascading numbness. My mind has gone for a wander with d/Death.
This short essay works as an attempt to call my mind back to my body, to his earthly home, lest he, in human exuberance, stray too long with a god so old and hungry. The short morsel entitles itself, “Seven dead in seven weeks.” I’ll finish it in six points.
ONE.
In many ways, writing feels like respirating / I am only now realizing Death makes me scared to breathe. I still feel like maybe if I am still, silent, unassuming… Death will forget about me and my family— if I manage to appease whatever hangs over us, if I duck and cover like a good little child, maybe then these rains that dissolve the lives and bodies of my loved ones will clear. I feel that I am not allowed to breathe.
Childish, do you hear me? Few things are certain in the corporal flesh body except death. The idea that I can mitigate death by way of compliance… in writing this down, I see threads of Western schools of thought. Those philosophies which preach that the arm of the state (the arm constitutionally attached to a gun) holds no fear for those who comply.
Sometimes I am confused. Sometimes I relate the two, the death that comes for us all and the Death that equates to suffering. Little d death is inevitable. Big D Death is the way humans shape death to hurt each other. Okay. Then: what does it mean that when I give name, face, and moral compass to the inevitable reality of death (thereby becoming a proper noun, Death), I imagine the gunned arm of the state? What could it mean that I associate the state with the death of my family? That I think of the nation state as inevitable Death? That its hand warps death into Death and ensures both are inevitable?
TWO.
Have you ever seen someone that looks like you die? On a cellular, spiritual, foundational level, it changes you.
Point Two, for the purposes of this essay, is less of a singular argument and more of an overarching theme. Thesis in hand: between the poles of life and death, morality becomes a child’s game. This is the sort of death (the kind that takes us all) does not care about whether I look defiantly in its eyes or not. death does not applaud my bravery or hear me in my misery. With what moral compass could death metabolize love, justice, grief, longing? death simply is.
To the rest of the essay: You will, from here on out, witness me describe people that look like me (smell like me, move through this world like me, etc.), experience d/Death— both in its ritualistic surety (d) and its human-sculpted, weaponized format (D). With them, an extension of me finds its final resting place as I become defined in/by/among their absence. The moral argument surrounding human empathy and compassion is, “We should care about others regardless of whether they are like us or not.” This orientation fundamentally disregards human’s social nature; we often make connections from sameness. Instead, I offer: everyone— every single one— is, more or less, like you.
THREE.
I can’t remember when I watched this talk by Virginia Tech Shooting Survivor Kristina Anderson, but I might never forget how she described her breath. How her conscious mind pleaded with her nervous system to stop breathing so much because the killer was there, and she’d already been shot, and she could feel her stomach hitting the chair under her as she slumped within her desk, wondering if she was successful at pretending to be dead. Hoping that if she was just still enough, the harbinger of Death would pass over her. In other interviews, done some years after a gunman and fellow student killed 32 people within his campus on a Monday afternoon in April, she reminds us there was not precedent for this. She tells us that she had no idea what gunfire sounds like, that she’d never heard a gun go off in her life— whereas I describe my compliance with the gunned arm of the State in the same way she does: terrified to do anything but play dead.
She ends up being shot three times— twice in the back and once in the foot. I’m not sure I would have thought this white girl from Virginia (or wherever she’s from) looked like me had I not seen these videos when I was a child. Yet, I too have this role in society— I get up on stage and describe Death up close, give it name and shape for those that cannot really imagine. I grew up in the town the Columbine shooting happened in. I don’t really have to imagine. She looks like she’d be around my cousin’s age in these interviews. He was shot dead a few weeks ago. Routine gun violence, as the State sees it. Yes, I look like this blue-eyed girl named Kristina. We favor each other in that we name the Death up close for a live studio audience, since we do not have to imagine.
FOUR.
While I am here stretching the bounds of our shared realms of possible— ask yourself what kind of Grief would compel a person to betray their human desires to become small and still in the face of active death. Imagine what has to happen to you to be compelled to speak in, around, or about the worst moments of your life.
Grief hijacks the mind. You become methodical, automatic, absent, “lucky.” As I watch my pen flit across this page, I am in the passenger’s seat. It is not me writing, I assure you; it is the breadth of death, that portion of God who still respirates, still feels a sense of humanity in the necessity of inhaling and exhaling, pushing my hand along this page, forming words from the etherous space where my thoughts usually reside. I, ismatu, am only here to witness the outpouring.
I look like that white girl shot at Virginia Tech just like I look like every Arabic-speaking Black African making plea after plea. Entire regions of people experience long-term extinction campaigns by way of planned starvation. Entire regions of people touch their tongues to English just to plead with us. I look like then in that I would not at all look out of place in the Nuba Mountains. I look like them in that I run out of food money when I do not make informative, well-circulated videos in my pretty, pretty English. I have puddles of what they have oceans of— on top of the physical suffering, the mental torment of wasting away, you know that you do not have the wherewithal to scream properly. And if you cannot scream well, you will die as you are, suffering and among the history books already. [Eight] dead in seven weeks in my own life and I am behind on every bill imaginable because I could not bear to bring myself into the spotlight while I was still so raw. Do you know what it is to have your mother ask you if we can survive like this? Do you know what has to happen to you to experience Death descend on you, rip the blood from your bones, tens of family members gone— just to then pick up a video phone and say social media hooks?
Do you know what it is to come on social media and plead for the life of your family and have people respond with emoji chains? This is the Death to self that capital requires— the stage manufactures a spotlight, allows Death to take shape, cast a shadow, become real to people that otherwise cannot imagine. That shift— from personal suffering to public recognition— stands in the gap between you and a waiting grave. I know that it does.
FIVE.
Finality brings about the end of possibility; for within the moment of definition, there ceases an unfolding expanse, entire worlds of the “could,” the “might,” the “maybe.” “Halfway.” “Someday.”
“Yet.”
The death of yet stings the most for me.
I remember when I lost my father’s sister; I cried for weeks at the pain of yet’s death. My life on the other side of the world menat that I had not met the majority of my family yet. Each time someone dies before I get to know them, so ceases the possibilities of the lives we could have had together, the stories shared. The ways I’ll never know my father because she dies before she could tell me how they grew up together, how she must have prayed for him to stay out of trouble, how she asked for me constantly. I know she dreamt of meeting me just as I did for her. When she died, I felt smacked by Grief I did not feel entitled to.
Dear Assata Shakur,
Remember when Mutulu Shakur died? I hope the news did not take too long to reach you. I hope you had someone to grieve with. I know what it is, to be alone when someone you love from a different life dies. I feel that with my family. I felt that with the woman I was named after. I felt that the day Baba Sekou passed away because I was across an ocean and he died in New York. He’s Baba to me but a friend to you, and he is the person who made you real to me— his wife (my auntie) was the one who told me you died. I do not feel entitled to grieve you; I did not know you. What I feel is the sting of yet. That same sting I felt and feel for Mutulu (but I would have called him Baba Mutulu). You all had just been made real to me. Baba Sekou is my friend. He talked to me about you as his friend. You went from someone I read about to someone (if you were not in exile. If you could be peacefully in New York) I would have called auntie. I want you to know: you were right to write about Sundiata’s smile. That man spent fifty years in prison and it still glows like the moon.
Tell Baba hey for me. Please.
-ismatu
SIX.
Someone asked me recently if I feel each death as they come independently. You know, I love it when white people are white. It’s white folks that ask questions like that, because you all are the ones that wouldn’t really know. It’s better that you ask if you don’t know, and this person asked genuinely. So I answered them: I told them, I don’t really know. I can’t feel anything.
Conclusions
Every time I experience a d/Death I am surprised by, I am also surprised I am still surprised. The nature of my own grief has alluded me for some time, but I finally believe I have located its shape and sound— grief, for me, embodies himself in the absence of my own mind. Or, simpler stated: every time someone near me dies, I briefly lose my mind. Misplaced. I mean that I lose my mind in the same way I often lose my cell phone: I simply don’t know where I put it and I often don’t care to find it. The mental vacuum creates a terrific, echoey, foreboding sense of absence. My mind wanders with d/Death and leaves my body here— forgetful, confused, unsure of the day, entirely not myself, floating still and disembodied in disarrayed peace. I forget that I am grieving. I forget to eat. What is there to say? There is no mind to direct my body (still here, shackled to time).
Thus, all my loved ones have come to fear radio silence from me. They know that sound of grief— where d/Death comes to visit my psyche. Him and I go walking. Each time my conscious mind unmoores from the mortal nature of time-based thought, the rest of me— the bits of me scattered amongst those who love me up close— collectively tense. I can only imagine their worries. Is this the time? Is this the wandering that begins a new era— or a new life? Will ismatu’s mind ever return or is this the d/Death that breaks them?
Well. I am here. Writing an essay, so. I suppose I’ve returned this time. I just want the record to show: in his bitterness, everyone forgets death is sweet. Sometimes I wonder if I am lucky to still be alive. Right now, I think the answer for me is yes. But would I feel that way if I had not had pepper soup today boiled for me by my friend? Would I feel this way if I could not celebrate the birth of my new cousins because baby formula had been banned from entering my country? Would I still feel lucky to be alive if I lost everyone on my mother’s side in a single airstrike?
Do you know what it is to still be alive and to feel forgotten about? While you are still there, amongst the sick and dead?
Member discussion