on "The Opacity of Grief" by tina m. campt

I was reading this lovely essay published on BOMB Magazine and wanted include some of my experiences.

When the author referenced to this as “the year of death”, I felt the same. In 2021, I lost my mother and my maternal grandmother within a few months of each other - July 14, 2021, and October 25, 2021 respectively. It was a devastating experience to return to that deep pit of grief.

I similarly had an experience with the medium of video, but during my pre-grief grieving. It was a video played at the New Museum as a part of [Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America](https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-1). Hundreds of short clips were spliced together, showing moments of childhood joy, teenaged and middle aged romance, delicate shots of being together. In a pandemic, where we were expressly prevented from being together, it reminded me of those memories of my childhood. Being together always - being together through things - being together regardless. There were shifts in my life of course where we weren’t together, but we never didn’t have each other. The loss of these two figures took them away from me.

The author writes extensively on the idea of frequency: the vibrational forces that ripple through us and into our communities and the ways that the medium across them change and morph because of the society and circumstances we are in.

On one hand, this made me think of the gentle voices since that have been in my life. Patience, kindness, compassion. It made me think of the voices I have lost: the gentle tone of my mother singing and the rasp in my grandmother’s voice from her old age.

But in the way that we grieve together, the community loses more than just people we love. Campt beautifully ties together the grief the Black and Brown communities feel under the brutality and violence within the United States at this present moment. The frequencies amplify each other, and they merge and divert at some points. They become combinations and permutations of the way we mourn the loss of so much - innocence, lives, justice, respect, position.

This essay ends on a sweet but inspiring note. It reminded me of the phoenix in my own mythology, a symbol of the woman and their wonderful fantasticalness:

While it is regularly reduced to a cinder, it will never be extinguished. The opacity of grief requires the labor of care and the labor of struggle.