Seven Years Part Of My Soul Has Been Gone

Today marks the seventh year Jomo has been gone.

It still feels so strange to type that… it still feels as though a part of myself has gone wandering out there in the multiverse, and well… it’s the longest we have been apart. I am still resigning myself to the fact that he won’t be. coming back to pick up the conversation where we left off.

As it so happens, I am in Barbados again for the first time in a decade and Jomo’s final resting place is in the backyard of what is now my house (strange as that is to type as well). It’s the house I grew up in; the house we both grew up in and where he died seven years ago. His ashes are scattered under an impressively large copse of bromeliads. Man of the soil, eh?

It is a strange experience being in this house without him. This is the first time in more than thirty years that I’ve been here and he doesn’t appear at regular intervals from his room. I want to tell you I’m listening out for him, that I can almost hear him. Yet, the truth is there is nothing of him here. Not a whisper, not a glimmer, no lingering ghost. My brother is just very gone from this place, Barbados and this world.

This also means I am at the end of March, a month of remembrance where the anniversaries of both my father’s and grandmother’s transitioning to the ancestral realm fall. I have been hating March for years now, and I expect it to continue. That I mourn them all still, and it feels so acute during this back to back month… maybe that feeling of loss won’t ever go away. But at least, for me, March is done for another year.

Ahhh… my twin and eye, this final sundering still feels impossible, even as it stretches into the back half of a decade.

I am certain I will never stop missing him.

Dayo and I just came in from the backyard, where I made my first set of prayers for Jomo. I expect that to be more regular too. I cried as I was singing the ancestral hymn Mansa was known for teaching, but… it also felt good to reach out to him. Honestly, as close as I feel them… they’re all three still looking out for me and Dayo.

Te extraño hermano. Para siempre.

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