Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #242
Guest Post by Darnell Lamont Walker + "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin - 09/16/21
Today we have our fourth guest post in a row this week! This one comes from Darnell Lamont Walker, someone I met on my trip to Esalen in August. Among many accolades, Darnell teaches writing workshops for the spiritual community there, and even though that wasn’t what I was there for, we struck up some great conversations, as fellow creatives. He’s a sweet & brilliant guy who delivered a knockout post today.
Here’s a more formal bio!
Darnell Lamont Walker is a writer, filmmaker, and artist, currently producing children’s media, creating content that allows all children to see themselves. Blue’s Clues and You, Two Whats?! And a Wow!, and Karma’s World are among the many shows Darnell has written for and supported.
Although he’s currently living between the Chattahoochee National Forest of Georgia and Johannesburg, South Africa, Charlottesville, Virginia, is Darnell’s hometown and the place he grew into an activist, fighting for the rights of all people.
Seeking Asylum, Darnell’s first film, explores safe spaces around the world for Black Americans seeking to escape American injustice. Next, Darnell produced Outside the House, a documentary exploring Black mental health. His third documentary, Set Yourself on Fire, is about the global rape epidemic, shot around the world. The goal is to continue to support communities around the world through the building of safe spaces where healing can happen.
Check out his website to learn more about his work, and in particular, to support the crowdfunding for his next independent film, an animated short, called Our Song.
Take it away, Darnell!
“Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me) by Ledisi
I woke up, rolled over, shuffled my “When Writing or Drinking Whiskey” playlist and was absolutely sure whatever came out of me was gonna be about love, considering the dream I had, and considering this playlist is heavy with heartache and sadness – as you can probably gather from the title. Ah well, that didn’t happen.
I pressed play and Ledisi’s version of Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas
came on and suddenly the thought of death and dying scuttled in. Begging someone not to leave, offering to be the shadow of their dog if that’ll give you just a few more moments…yes, death of course! And well…then I thought about my great aunt and this happened:
It’s been 30 years since I’ve cried tears of sadness for the dead.
Long before I learned of the indigenous mothers in certain corners of Brazil who found it damaging to cry when their babies died, I’d already given up on grief. These mothers believe their spirit-children must journey through the dark, up stairs, up hills, or maybe there will be ropes, and their salty tears will only impede the journey. Neighbors and loved ones drop by to remind them of this. I believe beautiful journeys don’t warrant mourning.
My great aunt Greta Mae remained a smoker long after the doctor told her it’d be the thing that killed her. Nine year old me and my older cousins worked in shifts, finding and throwing away loosies and packs, attempting to save a life. We didn’t and the doctor wasn’t wrong and while the entire family watched an already tiny women dwindle into a poorly threaded hospital sheet, I saw the beginning of an incredible journey.
Aunt Greta Mae didn’t talk much in the end. There was so little space for the philosophizing she often found time for when she’d gather with friends and her older sister, my grandma, on that old porch she never got around to painting, in that back yard that was often overgrown but still beautiful, and over card games and good food in living rooms that seemed large then. She laid there and smiled at certain faces, and we smiled back. We weren’t church folks at the time, so everything I knew about heaven, I learned from school friends, teachers, and the old people in my life who kept dry cleaned suits and dresses hanging in the front of their closets for what seemed to me like weekly funerals. They’d go on and on about the fun things they’d do when they arrived and ran into the people they miss most. Heaven sounded fun like bookfairs and field days at school. I wasn’t extremely close to anyone who died at the time, but I understood their enthusiasm.
There were so many loud beeps and not enough nurses who cared to stop them. Up and down the halls, patients yelled for more water, more food, ice, new bedpans, and companionship. Aunt Greta Mae was quiet and still and so was I, staring for signs of life or maybe even regret – a word I’d taught myself a few weeks prior. She gasped and her eyes rolled toward me and I gasped, too. “Mama came by earlier.” I didn’t know what to say. My great grandmother, her mama, was dead. I knew her, but was too young to attend a funeral, my mama thought. How could she have come by here? Does cancer make us remember things that never happened? What is happening? I had many thoughts and too many questions. “Mama came by earlier to get me, but said I had to wait until she finishes my room. She’ll be back for me later. Maybe tomorrow” Surely my eyebrows raised a bit, but I somehow, in that moment, knew what she meant. She was sure and I somehow knew she was right.
I wanted to be there when her mama came to see if I’d see her, too, but it was time to go home, to my own room. We said our goodbyes and my mama kissed Aunt Greta Mae on the forehead and we left. I had to be up early for school, and I’m sure my mother thought that was enough death and dying for me for one day. Aunt Great Mae died the next day like I knew she would. My mama told me just before dinner, maybe thinking releasing tears would make space for the spaghetti. I didn’t cry. I remember being happy for the journey my Aunt Greta Mae was on with her own mama, and how that must have felt like love. I hoped she loved her room.
Darnell! Man, that story really got me, man. Thank you so much for sharing. So happy to have you and your family’s story memorialized on the Substack, and with such a beautiful song, too.
We talked via Instagram about how the song actually mentions a ‘room.’
If you go away like I know you must
There'll be nothing left in this world to trust
Just an empty room full of empty space
Like that empty look I see on your face
I'd've been the shadow on your dark if I thought it would
Have kept you by my side
Ledisi, in her adaptation, sings of the ‘empty room’ she will be left with when the person in her life goes. And how she would have been ‘the shadow in their dark’ to ‘have kept them by her side.’
Darnell, of course, seems preternaturally aware at a young age that his great aunt was being welcomed into the light of her new ‘room’.
It reminds me of this meme:
Darnell also told me on IG that after that experience and years of witnessing similar ones with others who were dying, he became a death doula.
He says there are certification programs, but you can also just volunteer in hospices and learn to hold space for the dying and get the hands-on experience.
My song today initially felt not just musically discordant to his but also synchronistically so:
“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin
The Led Zeppelin song from 1970 was written about and inspired by the band’s trip to Iceland and the Viking culture there.
We come from the land of the ice and snow
I realized though that, to me, memoiristically, it reminds me of my own family’s immigration from ‘the ice and snow’ of Russia/Eastern Europe.
Last month, I received my ancestry.com DNA results and learned that I am a whopping 99% Eastern European Jewish (Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus, Northeast Poland, and Russia).
That remaining 1%?
Baltic.
Which I guess just means 1% non-Jewish of those same areas?
LOL.
So yes, lots of ‘ice and snow’.
Our only goal will be the western shore
I’ve been having trouble tracking my ancestors farther back than the late 1800s, but it seems my mom’s mom’s parents could be traced back to Russia before they immigrated to the US.
Which reminded me of another cover of the original French song, but one from my ethnic tradition, the Russian-American singer Regina Spektor’s “Don’t Leave Me (Ne me quitte pas)”
Which transposes the story to generations raised in pre-21st century New York City:
And down on Lexington they're wearing
New shoes stuck to aging feet
And close their eyes and open
And they'll recognize the aging street
And both that song and Darnell’s piece remind me of the story of my own experience of my mom’s mom’s death.
I don’t think I can tell it as well as Darnell told his perhaps.
But essentially for many months my mom’s mom had been living in our town in Western New York.
She had once been very warm and funny, but had started to have some senility as she neared the end.
And was less kind to my mom and sometimes the rest of us than she used to be.
Things felt near a breaking point, to me, at least.
But then she attended her son’s wedding in Manhattan with grace and good cheer.
Soon after, back in Western New York one night, I heard the telephone ring, and I felt my body snap out of alignment with itself and my spirit sort of raise up above me.
It was a call telling us the news.
She passed away that night.
Something in the fabric of my (99% Eastern European Jewish) genetics or the fabric of the universe had alerted me to this before it was even possible for me to have known.
And, yet, I also knew it wasn’t a bad thing.
I pause for a moment to consider that both Darnell and I reflected today on death, and how today is the Jewish Holiday of Yom Kippur, of which it’s said names are inscribed by God to be in the Book of the Living or the Book of the Dead for the upcoming year.
I’m reminded of how Darnell’s song comes from Ledisi’s album Ledisi Sings Nina, which are covers of Nina Simone songs.
And of Nina’s famous song: “Ain’t Got No - I Got Life”
In it, Nina sings about how she ‘ain’t got” a lot of things:
Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes
Ain't got no money,Ain't got no father, ain't got no mother
But she also rejoices about what she has ‘got’:
I got my hair on my head
I got my brains,I got my heart, I got my soul
And most significantly:
I’ve got life!
Today, Darnell and I, and you readers, reading this, we’ve got life.
Let’s live it!
Okay, that’s the two hundred and forty-second Shuffle Synchronicities.
Today, in Other! Substacks, check out The Cadence, produced by Good Life Music and Content Curious, which believes that the great reset to the music industry caused by COVID will usher in a new era where creativity sits at the head of the table and IP at the center of the conversation. The Substack’s most recent post is about how Apple Music is partnering with Shazam not just to monetize their DJ playlists but also perhaps to monetize any song played anywhere there’s a microphone to hear it. Their interpretation, for what it’s worth, is “somewhere between the lawlessness still present in much of today’s online music and the dystopian state of tomorrow, there might exist a balance where creators get paid for their work. Wouldn’t that be nice?”