Confronting the Weight of Our Deaths

Marcellus Williams, Lebanon, Sudan, Gaza, me, and you.

Ancestor, Marcellus Williams, who was murdered by the state of Missouri.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. Not in the abstract, but in the real sense—the way a body vanishes, the way time stops being a thing we can measure. I was seven the first time I realized what mortality meant. Seven when my mother, face etched with a kind of quiet fear, sat me down and taught me about Emmett Till. She told me about his unrecognizable face, his swollen body, the weight of his absence, the white lies that killed him. She told me because it was necessary. Because in America, knowing the danger is part of surviving the danger.

What a strange inheritance it is, to learn your mortality like it’s a family recipe. To be handed your fear and told, hold this close—it might save your life.

Since then, death and I have become more acquainted than I could have ever imagined. It’s a companion, not by choice but by consequence, lurking in the shadows of my words, in the spaces between the sentences, where breath should be easy but instead feels measured. Because you can’t be a Black American writer without considering death. America was designed to kill us, to suffocate us slowly in its grip of laws, customs, and violence. So, either you are writing to help stop what kills us, to fight back with every syllable, or you are writing to remind us of the beauty of evading death—how miraculous it is to still be here, how triumphant it is to live in spite of.

I write a bit in both spaces. Trying to capture the joy that slips through the cracks like sunlight, when our laughter refuses to be stifled, when we hold each other close, defying the long history that says we should not have survived. While I also trying to trace the outlines of the knife, to name the toxins in the air, to find the silent hands around our necks. Knowing it’s not just a body dropping—it’s the systems, the policies, the quiet agreements, the whiteness.

Frankly, after spending most of my life centering it—I didn’t think I could become more fluent in the language of death. Not until I met it face-to-face, skin cold, bones stiffening. But the last twelve months have taught me otherwise.

The execution of Marcellus Williams in Missouri this week, despite the millions of voices that rose up like a storm to save him, made me sit with just how much death I am holding. We are holding. I had to reflect on the weight of it all—quiet but insistent, like a bruise that never fades. Wondering where the limits are, how much more we can carry. I thought of the protests, the petitions, the speeches, and yet Mr. Williams’ body fell, another name tossed into the long river of Black death we’re asked to wade through daily.

Marcellus Williams was accused of killing Felicia Gayle, a former reporter, but the DNA found on the murder weapon didn’t match his. Appeals were filed, cries for justice rang out from across the country, and even the victim’s family members spoke out, urging for a stay of execution, questioning why new evidence was being ignored. But the system, which is so skilled at swallowing Black lives, did what it always does. It denied him a future.

I spent the morning after his execution thinking about his last meal. Chicken wings and tater tots. Something so simple, yet so beautifully authentic. I imagined him eating slowly, savoring each bite, knowing it was the last taste he would ever have of this world. Then I read a poem over and over by my brother,

Joél Leon

, honoring Mr. Williams. The poem was titled after that last meal—CHICKEN WINGS, TATER TOTS—and I cried. And I continued to cry. I cried for the ordinariness of it, for the tenderness, for the fact that any life can be reduced to a final meal. Then I lifted weights.

Gripping the cold iron, I pulled against gravity like I could build a fortress around my bones. Maybe, if I get stronger, if my muscles grow, less things can kill me. But halfway through the last set, I stopped, dropped the bar, and cried again. Because I know—deep down—no amount of strength could stop it either way. When it’s time for them to kill me, they’ll just use the muscles as an excuse. If not, they’ll use my writing, or my past, or my posts about Gaza, or my sorrow, or my posts about Assata Shakur, or my future, or my anger, or my niggas, or the fact that I still say nigga, or my music, or my dog, or my hoodie, or no excuse at all.

“Because we can, nigger.”

When I had cried the last tears I had for Mr. Williams and this Black life of mine, my thoughts wandered to the last meals of others recently turned into ancestors. Those we’ve lost in Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo, Gaza, Rikers, and so many places. We are witnessing so much Black and Brown death, it’s hard to tell where the mourning begins and where it ends.

Death these days seems to stretch out like an ocean with no horizon, no shore in sight. We are drowning in it. It wraps itself around our ankles, pulls at our knees, creeps up our chests like a wave of cold water on an early morning, except this cold don’t wake you—it freezes you. Solidifies the breath in your throat so you can’t scream, even though there’s a scream begging to be released. And you carry it with you like a stone, like a piece of glass lodged deep under the skin.

The death I’ve dedicated my life to defeating is a nightmare—and yet—recently death somehow seems worse. This past year, I’ve felt as though I’m dragging my body across a landscape littered with lives lost—people we knew, people we never met but whose names we hold like whispered prayers.

You see, Black and Brown bodies have always been seen as currency—things to be sold, to be spent, to be shaped for entertainment, framed for lust, all of it laid out on the altar of this country's institutions and individuals. But what's changed now is the ease with which we witness it, the way death slides into our palms like a text message. No warning, no curtain drawn. Most scroll past bodies like footnotes, blood-soaked and pixelated, and somehow it feels ordinary. The media has gotten so comfortable with showing us our own dying that they don’t even bother to cloak it anymore, don’t pretend it's anything but what it is: a body, our body, falling into the dirt, much of the whole world looking on with indifference.

We’ve even normalized all the ways death comes to us now. Not just in the bullets, nooses, and prisons, but in the air, the water, the food, personal electronics turned into weapons of terror, drones, the school shootings, and the very soil we stand on.

The truth, as harsh as it is plain, is that many of us have seen hundreds of bodies that should remind us of Emmett Till's, not in history books or grainy photographs but in the bright, unforgiving light of our phones. In just the past month, I’ve witnessed atrocity after atrocity, each one more terrible than the last, and yet, there is no end in sight. The world has become a theater of blood, and our bodies—Black and Brown—are its perpetual performers.

I have used my voice, my platform, my talent—God knows I have tried. And I am not alone in this. So many of us have fought with every syllable, every breath, clawing for the lives of Black and Brown people as though we could pull them from the jaws of death itself. But what happens when your cries fall on ears long trained to ignore the sound of suffering? What happens when the truth you’ve fought to tell is buried beneath the weight of indifference? The case of Marcellus Williams, the slaughter in Gaza—these are not isolated tragedies. They are the rule, not the exception, in a world that has been taught to swallow our lives whole, without so much as a pause for grief.

And so I ask myself—no, I ask all of us: Is it enough to teach empathy, to hope that by holding our pain up to the light, we might bend it into something that teaches others how to feel? Perhaps that is why I’m still writing, why we are still shouting into the void, painting pictures with the colors of our hurt. But empathy, for all its poetic weight, can be a fragile thing—a whisper against the wind, something you think you’ve heard, but then the noise of the world pulls it apart. We are often taught that empathy can save us, that if people could just see our pain, they would understand. But what happens when they’ve seen too much of it? When the image of our suffering becomes too common?

I don’t believe empathy was ever enough.

It’s not enough to teach someone how to feel; they need to know what to do with that feeling. How does empathy move from the heart to the hands? How does it become action, something sharp enough to cut through the vines of indifference that choke the air we breathe? What is empathy if it doesn’t come with a consequence for those who refuse to change?

We keep shouting the names of the dead as though we can make them immortal, but who has truly paid for what has been done to Gaza, to Marcellus Williams, to Emmett Till, to Lebanon, to Uvalde, to Mexico, to Breonna Taylor, to Sandy Hook, to Trayvon Martin, to Puerto Rico, to my grandmother, to Flint, to my Uncle Randall, to Native Americans, to me, to you? The systems that bury us in grief remain intact, grinding forward, unbothered by our tears. Words alone can’t dismantle power; they can’t topple the machine.

We need more than stories, more than empathy—there has to be something sharper, something that strikes at the roots of the system and not just its branches.

Accountability.

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The death penalty must be abolished because there is no justice in a system that silences rather than redeems, that buries its sins beneath the weight of finality. It is a slow, deliberate violence that speaks not of righteousness, but of the failure to imagine grace for even the most broken among us.