Sometimes when I find myself cleaning more than my share, washing others' dishes or otherwise, I have to force myself to stop, because I can easily do too much. And as sensitive to inequality as I am, I inevitably grow resentful when the favor isn't returned.
To counteract that feeling of resentment, I like to reaffirm to myself that I'm just a person who leaves things better than I found them. So it's not that I am doing things for people who neither appreciate nor reciprocate, but that I'm just being who I am.
Having an identity to ground me pulls me out of those feelings of inequity. It works, for the small things at least. But it's hard to reconcile the big things, the kind of inequities that can tear one apart. Of having loved someone and received only trauma in return.
On the most recent episode of Scandal, a black boy named Brandon Parker is shot dead by a white police officer, an incident parallel to the Michael Brown shooting. However, in the episode Brandon's father Clarence comes to the scene with a shotgun to demand answers. The standoff is tense and unresolved - so Olivia Pope comes to the rescue, as she always does.
The first time Clarence opens up to Olivia, it's to talk about how carefully he raised Brandon, keeping him away from girls, just trying to get Brandon to make it to college without getting jailed or killed. It is tragic, all those years as a single father, raising a son to be good and eventually successful - only to have all of that wrested from him by a single shot.
There is the unfair, unequal, unjust, the chores that can be more evenly split, the burdens that can be more equally shouldered, and there is this. How do you speak of justice to someone who loved and ultimately lost? How do you reclaim what the world has incomprehensibly taken?
The chain of events is never enough of a "why". And in that absence of explanation it is emotionally satisfying to go for blame, for revenge, for broke. This is how trauma begets trauma - because the options are so devastatingly limited.
Clarence doesn't shoot anyone, but he comes close to it when the knife that Brandon supposedly wielded against police is found. He is not in denial - no, the blood sweat and tears that went into raising that child meant that no one could possibly tell him different than what he knew, which is that Brandon never carried no knife.
And in the face of loss, that is the only thing you have left. The irrefutable knowledge of what once was. Though Brandon could no longer validate his life's work, Brandon's memory could, and Clarence was damned if anybody was going to wrest that away too.
I'll be the first to admit I have never experienced anything close to losing a child. But my sobbing told me I knew something about loss - the labor of loving, that monument of carefully bundled thought and care and the subsequent falling away, what you built obliterated without so much as a why or what for, and then the ceaseless sifting for what is left, if anything. That irresistible urge to forsake it all, to brute-force level the site and condemn it as barren wasteland, and then to subsist elsewhere.
But the duty is, or has to be, not to claim senselessly when something has been senselessly claimed. To live and live only with the uncertain assurance that something was given (up, away), and someday something else entirely will be given (but not back). That is certainly not equality or justice, but life never promised either, has a way of depriving us of both, and to reject it would be choosing to have nothing.
To accept is to realize that as long as there was love - love has changed something. That even when it is no longer manifests itself it has altered us in that way that enables us to feel for one another. Clarence meeting the President, a fellow father who lost his son, crying. Me watching the episode, someone who lost someone else, crying. Because in grief, in that irrefutable knowledge of what once was, there is recognition. That kind of seeing yourself in another that maybe, just maybe, was the point for us all along.