(ThyBlackMan.com) I have stood at too many gravesides this year. Every one of them hands me the same lesson, and every time I act surprised to get it. We put things off. The tough talk waits. A kind word stays stuck in the throat. The pictures sit in a drawer, the paperwork never gets signed, and then we spend real money trying to say over a casket what we never managed to say across a supper table.
An old barber back home, man they called Percy, told me once you can read what a person loves by what he keeps up. Same idea as a garden. You water it before the dry spell hits, not standing over brown stalks come August. With our own kin we forget that part. A brother stops calling and you let it ride. Your cousin turns bitter and you figure he will come around on his own. Daddy goes quiet in his chair and you promise yourself there is still time, next month, next holiday, soon. Then the phone rings on a Tuesday morning and time is gone.
Let me be plain about the money first, since a lot of us flinch from it. Research from Boston College found a striking divide among older households: about 34 percent of Black households had a will, compared with 79 percent of white households. That gap is not small. White families in this country hold close to 6 times the median wealth of Black families. That wealth divide has many causes, but one piece of the problem is what happens when families die without clear instructions for transferring the assets they managed to build. When somebody passes with no valid will, state law generally determines who inherits. His house, often the biggest thing he ever bought, can end up divided among multiple heirs who cannot agree. From there can come title problems, legal fights, unpaid taxes or even a forced sale that wipes away much of what four decades of labor built. I have watched this happen on my own street. A good brick home that raised three children was sold for pennies because nobody wanted to sit down and plan while Daddy was living. The grief was real. What came after was avoidable.
Here is the part that eats at me, though. The will, hard as it feels, is actually the simple piece. What you cannot get a notary to stamp is the inheritance that matters more.
There is an old warning among people who preserve family history that oral stories can disappear in as little as 3 generations if nobody deliberately keeps passing them down. Your grandfather is walking around with things nobody ever wrote down. He knows what town his people ran from, and why they left in the dark. Somewhere in him is a song his mama hummed at the washtub, one you have never caught and never will unless you sit down and ask. Bury him with all of that still in his head and it goes under the dirt with him, every bit. Something about burying an elder keeps eating at me. We act like we lost one person, when sometimes we also buried everything that person knew and never handed to another soul.
So ask him. Sit with your uncle and let the recorder run on your phone. You’ll feel foolish for about ten minutes, and then he’ll start, and you’ll realize you never truly knew the one who raised your mother. My own father and I lost years to a stubbornness neither of us could name. One summer I got tired of carrying it, drove down, sat on his porch, and said the thing I should have offered a decade before. He cried. I had never seen that. We got six more years after that porch, and I would trade a great deal of what I own for one of them.
This is the reconciliation nobody wants to preach on. We hold our finest words back for the eulogy, like the dead are in any shape to hear them. He needed that Thursday, over fried fish, with his heart still going. So tell him now, out of your own mouth, while it lands on ears that work. Making peace at the graveside might soothe you some, but it does the man himself no good at all. Why sit on a grudge until the only place it gets spoken is a church full of folks dressed in black?
Photographs matter more than young folks give them credit for. Print them. I mean that. Too much of your life is trapped inside a device that may be broken, replaced or inaccessible a few years from now. My grandmother kept a shoebox, and after she passed, that beat-up box held us together better than any sermon could. We sat on the floor and laughed and fussed over who was who in the pictures, and for those couple hours she was back in the room with us. A child needs to see the faces he came out of. He needs proof he belongs to something bigger and older than whatever this week is throwing at him.
And the encouragement. Lord, the encouragement. Too many of our boys come up having never once heard a grown man look them in the eye and say he is proud of them. A lot of us were raised rough, taught that going soft was something the world would make us pay for. Maybe that was true for our fathers. For our sons it is doing real damage. One honest word from an older head can turn a young life clean around. I watched a hardhead become a deacon because one person would not quit on him, said it to his face over and over. Does not cost a dime. No lawyer has to be in the room. Just takes some nerve to open your mouth.
I am not knocking a fine homegoing, understand. Our people made an art out of the funeral for good reason. For generations, segregation and racism denied Black families equal dignity in too many parts of American life, so we built and protected our own traditions around death and mourning. The repast, the choir tearing the roof off, the long line of shined-up cars. All ours, every bit. Still, no amount of glory at the end makes up for being absent through the middle. A gold casket is a sorry way to apologize for ten cold years.
So what am I asking you to do? Write the thing, yes. Put the names down, get the property titled right, tell somebody where you keep the papers. Handle that this month. Then do the harder work, the part no form has room for. Phone the relative you fell out with. Pull the photos off the cloud and into a frame on the wall. Press a hundred dollars and a hard truth into your grandbaby’s hand. Sit the old woman down and get her talking while she is still here to do it. And tell a grown man to his face, out loud, that you love him, while he is still around to grumble something back.
We judge a life by how many folks pack the church at the end. That is the wrong measuring stick. Your legacy is not the flowers on the casket, and it is not the length of the program. A deed with the right names on it, so your grandchildren keep a roof over their heads, that is legacy. So is your mother’s laugh saved on a phone where some child can play it back long after you are gone. The quarrel you settled face to face instead of leaving it to curdle at the repast, that counts too. And the scared boy who straightened his life out because one evening you sat him down and told him he mattered. None of that waits on the undertaker. It is work for the living, and the living start today.
Staff Writer;Â Lee Walker
This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.
Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.
