The last words of Elijah McClain

This afternoon in Aurora, CO, the amended autopsy report on the death of Elijah McClain was released. The 23-year old Black man was injected with ketamine by paramedics following his restraint by police. McClain was stopped after purchasing a bottle of iced tea at a corner store.

Someone had called the authorities, reporting a Black man wearing a ski mask and waving his arms. According to his family, McClain wore a ski mask due to a blood condition that often left him feeling cold. Police put him in chokehold, applying pressure to his carotid artery and injected with the powerful drug against his will.

Seven minutes later, he went into cardiac arrest. Less than a week later, he was taken off life support and declared dead.

I ask forgiveness in advance of my Black friends and readers, and indeed any African American person reading this, who may experience pain at reading yet another example of this ghastly assault on the humanity of POC, particularly the young men.

This is not intended for you. It's intended for people like me, people who might otherwise have sighed and said, "What a tragedy!" then move on to the next news item.

Every time I leave the house, particularly at night, I'm aware of the privilege of my invisibility—in spite of my queerness, my age, or anything other component part of my most visible identity. I can buy iced tea, or Skittles, anytime I want, at any hour.

I could wear a ski mask if I want to, and if I was stopped by the police, I could clarify my position, perhaps even take the upper hand with a slight change of tone, or a different voice, or a veiled comment about lawyers, or that I have connections in the media. Truth be told, I might not even have to. All I'd have to do is take my ski mask off and let the police see my skin colour.

For now, I'm haunted by this transcript of Mr. McClain's final words, the vulnerability of him in face of the all-powerful authority figures who ultimately doomed him.

His words break my heart, and, ironically, even the fact that I have the luxury of having my heart broken by the terrible humanity and fragility of those words is, itself, a form of privilege. I can afford to be horrified and appalled instead of feeling what can only be a ghastly, 400-year old unhealed wound, barely bandaged by an awful sort of familiarity—a familiarity I can only imagine, but never claim to truly know.

No community should have to absorb tragedy after tragedy in the hopes that it effects change. And the job of the change shouldn't be on them— it should be on us.

September morning, over coffee

 

I woke up this morning inexplicably missing my parents. I don't dwell in the past, as a rule, but this journey upon which I've been forced to embark has many detours and side-roads that usually come at night, in dreams. For some reason, I've lately found myself immersed in memories of my mother, and how she loved Christmas, and how, when I was very young, before I started to become an actual "person" who could objectively be liked, or disliked, or argued with, or found "difficult" or "complicated," we had this perfect communion, she and I. All of the early lessons I learned about morality, or kindness, or always putting others first (a tricky lesson—very good for a child, a less useful baseline for an adult) came from her. She had cancer in 2001, but she died from a heart attack, effectively beating cancer at its own game. She was an intrepid woman, and she would have had some wisdom to share right about now. My occasionally very difficult relationship with my late father notwithstanding, there have been so many times in the past four months when I have imagined how great it would have been to be able to pick up the phone and call him, and discuss what I'm feeling, and what I'm going through. None of this is that sentimental business about wishing you'd told people how much you loved them, or "saying the things you needed to say." We did all that, for better or for worse. Articulating feelings, thoughts, impressions, or opinions was never lacking in the Rowe family. But among the great gifts of being sixty is the vast gulf of time between the pain of the past, and the reality of the present, a reality in which you know who you are, and you can (finally) see, and embrace, the fragility and humanity of people who, at one time, held so much power. And this morning, what I wouldn't give for the feel of my father's old Viyella shirt against my face, or to catch a whiff of my mother's Je Reviens perfume, a final touch of magic dabbed on before she left the house with my father to look impossibly glamorous for other people. Or for the scent of her Christmas cookies in the oven, the ones with the almond frosting, that always heralded a time of light in the darkness, of beauty, of colours, and of a brief moment in time when everything was, literally, perfect. Nothing is ever perfect, and yet, sometimes, it just was.