“Fuck you,” I said. “He’s not anxious and confused. He’s dying!”
Ten days after we arrived, my father was no longer speaking (but he was breathing, compliments of the oxygen). Ava and I left for New York City. She had to get back to school, and I was scheduled to fly to L.A. to produce a Nylon magazine event—of all things—with Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens.
“Just watch,” I said to the kids in my New York office. “Now my father’s going to die.”
In fact, I was in my closet with my assistant packing my bags when my sister called, crying. I could feel my assistant looking at me, thinking, Oh dear God, please, please tell me that’s not your sister. Don’t tell me he’s dead. I do not want to be the one in the room with you. I have done everything for you. Don’t make me do this. Please do not freak out. Please, please, please. He looked like he was bracing to be hit by a tidal wave.
“My father is dead,” I told him calmly. “But I am not going to lose my shit. Everything will be all right.”
I immediately called my teacher in India for advice. He told me to take the flight to L.A. I got a car to the airport and called my nanny, Nana, to tell her to get Ava out of school and on a plane to L.A. as fast as possible.
When I arrived at the airport, I was informed by the woman at the Delta counter that there was no way I’d make my flight, since I was eight minutes late for check-in. For the first time since my father had taken a turn for the worse, I started crying. I cried and cried, and I was definitely not outside. Out of nowhere, two more Delta employees appeared, both very large African American women.
“Girl, is that Kell on Earth?” one asked. “Didn’t she write that book about crying outside, and now she’s crying inside!”
They asked me what was wrong, and I explained that my father was dead, but that I was flying across the country in the wrong direction to put on an event with Zac Efron, and now I’d missed my flight check-in by eight minutes.
“Her daddy just died, and you’re not letting her on the plane?” exclaimed one of the women accusingly to the ticket agent. “You are heartless. She’s famous.”
Who was I to argue? I put on my black sunglasses, and the two women ushered me through the airport, accompanying me through security to my gate and making sure I had the best seat. Sitting on the plane, relieved and drained, I felt like a layer of my existence had been peeled off. I was about to fly to L.A. and attend a party, while the rest of my tribe was retreating to grieve. Was I really going to work?
But I also knew that, as a yogi, I needed to put my belief systems into action and suck it up. If I really believed the physical body was not the soul, and that my father’s soul was levitating with my jet as we lifted above the runway, then why would I allow myself to be paralyzed with grief? Why wouldn’t I continue the work that had made my father proud and that was supporting my daughter, his lineage? At the moment of takeoff, I imagined him moving physically and psychically in the same direction as the plane, from the earth to the sky.
My daughter arrived that evening to meet me at the event. The good news was she got to meet Zac Efron. But later in our room I told her that her grandfather, “Da”—who had always called her his “downtown girl” and taken it upon himself to be the premiere loving male figure in her life—was dead. Ava howled like a cross between a baby whale and a wolf.
We flew to Virginia again the next day. By now I’ve seen a lot of people die, and I can tell you that having children or money or fame is no guarantee that anyone will be at your death. At the scene of my father’s death, we found my two siblings, their children, and my mother, who had morphed from a conservative 1950s housewife to something else entirely.
“Now let me tell you something,” she said to us. “My husband is dead, and this is my house, and we are going to do what I want.”
All of us—my sister, Allison, my brother, Lee, our kids, me—felt our jaws drop.
“We are not going to church,” she continued. “We’re going to have a celebration of life ceremony. We will put your father’s ashes on the table, we’ll have Father Jim come to the house, and we’ll all stand around talking about what we liked about your father.”
The message was clear. Allison, no more hysterics. Lee, no more bullying, and Kelly, no spewing liberal dogma. We would celebrate my father, and the sparks that created all of us and our children too. There we were, all of his sparks, shining to the rhythm of his love, teachings, and memory.
Not long after my grandfather died in 1986, my mom called me to say she was worried we might need to move my grandmother to Virginia to be closer to her. The problem? She wouldn’t stop talking to Billy, her dead husband, in the dining room every day. “She thinks he’s really there,” my mom whispered. I told her I agreed that we should move her, on one condition—that my mother could prove that my grandmother wasn’t speaking to my grandfather. Well, this story later proved yet another reason we should not point our fingers at our tribal elders.
When my mom walked down the plank of life herself and became a seventy-one-year-old widow, she also missed her lover, and she too
