Two songs have brought me to tears since the death of my friend, Alanna Ford. The first was a new song from Warren Haynes called “Real, Real Love.” Haynes took a partially composed lyric that his late friend, Gregg Allman, wrote, and crafted a beautiful and soulful full-length exploration of the purpose, meaning, and sadness that love ushers into our lives. The song has a slow build to its climax, allowing for Haynes to amplify his powerful voice while Derek Trucks plays spirited and somber phrases on the guitar. In the last verse, Haynes sings, “The only things that matter are the ones that live and breathe / And we keep a little part of them when they leave.”
Listening to the song in the car, I felt the emotion grab me by the lapels. Before I could gain my composure, my eyes were raining. The lyric at the heart of “Real, Real Love” is true in the actual and aspirational sense. When a person we love dies, the memories and the influence forever remain part of our experience and continue, even in the person’s physical absence, to color our perception of the world. We also have the desperate hope that, despite everything we know about the finality of death, the departed will remain with us. Many of the bereaved offer stories of “visitation dreams,” believing that their deceased loved one spoke to them in the mysterious world of the subconscious that we visit after falling asleep. There are others who insist on even more tangible, waking moments of reunion, interpreting various experiences and observations as signs from the one they long to see again.
“Real, Real Love” concludes with a tearful guitar solo, backup singers repeating the phrase, “Real love,” and Haynes belting out a plea, “Open up your arms and save me…” It is possible that he is personifying love, voicing something like a prayer to an abstract emotional force, or maybe he is singing to the departed a prayer of mystery that may never receive an answer. A prayer that can leave the lips with or without faith; faith that the deceased can hear and feel us, or a mere invocation of emotional and spiritual longing meant to express the deepest, most intractable desires of the soul.
When the song ended, I spoke the words out loud, “I love you, Alanna.” I don’t know if she heard me.
I met Alanna Ford in September of 2014. She had recently become a staff member at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s civil rights and humanitarian organization, located in Chicago. I had arrived to interview Jackson, my longtime political hero, for the first of many times. Our topic was the 30th anniversary of his groundbreaking and historic run for the presidency in 1984. Because I had only seen Jackson on television, typically giving oratory or brilliant analysis, the words thundering from his large, charismatic frame, I sat in a conference room, feeling intimidated. Doing my best to maintain a veneer of professional cool, I sat quietly, reviewing the notes that I had prepared for the interview, waiting for Jackson’s entrance.
Then, a woman of striking physical beauty entered the room. Wearing a cream-colored business suit and high heels, an electric-light smile flashed across her face as she extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Alanna,” she said, “What are you planning on discussing with Reverend Jackson?”
As I introduced myself, she sat down in an adjacent seat. When I answered, she replied at almost the instant that I finished my sentence with the word, “campaign”: “Why does that interest you?”
I launched into an explanation of exactly why I believed that Jackson’s two bids for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party were, along with Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, the “high water mark” (I actually remember using that phrase) of presidential politics, and should serve as a model for all future campaigns for national office. I went into detail, most likely at cumbersome length, considering that I often talk too much when nervous. At the end of my mini-monologue, Alanna sat back in her chair, took her elbows off the table, crossed her legs, smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.
She asked me how long I had been a journalist, and I asked her how long she worked for PUSH. After volunteering for years, she accepted an offer to join the staff. Her mother and father were members and supporters since the creation of the organization in 1971. Alanna told me that she studied journalism and political science at Boston University, choosing to attend the same college as Martin Luther King. We discussed what drew us both to journalism, and how her trajectory landed her at PUSH as a communication assistant for Jackson.
“I like your boots,” she said when noticing that I was wearing a pair of the cowboy variety, “Where’s your horse?”
I laughed, and said that I had him tied to the bicycle rack outside. We laughed together. Suddenly, it hit me that I was no longer nervous.
Jacques Derrida wrote, “To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die…There is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude…And everything that we inscribe in the living present of our relation to others already carries, always, the signature of memoirs-from-beyond-the grave.”
Looking back, it is obvious to me that Alanna and I became friends within minutes of meeting. I did not know then, even if I was aware of the inevitability that Derrida aptly described, that we would have ten years together. She would die ten years to the month from that miraculous moment that we shook hands – our worlds intertwining, despite the overwhelming odds that, in a planet of billions of people and even more possible circumstances, we would never see each other.
Alanna’s friendship was a rare, all-enveloping connection. It is common for friends to develop certain roles in life – some are best for fun, casual conversation and nights out, while others are more intellectual and focused on a shared interest, and still others become emotional confidants. Alanna was all of the above. She covered everything with her abounding compassion, endless curiosity, and wicked sense of humor. My conversations with her were innumerable, but they all coalesced to form one ongoing exchange that forever hovered between a laugh and a tear, easily able to swing from one to the other, without respect for the boundaries that typically restrict most relationships.
The first border that our friendship traversed was that separating the professional from the personal. During the first few months of our getting to know each other, most of our discussions were related to the work of Rainbow/PUSH. Within the organization, she advocated for Rev. Jackson to spend more time giving me interviews and allowing me to observe his work up close. Alanna believed that I “captured Jackson’s voice and purpose,” to use her phrase, better than other writers. If not for her tireless promotion of my writing, it is unlikely that I would have spent six years conducting regular interviews with Jackson – all of which eventually led to my political biography, I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. Although I only mention Alanna a handful of times in my book, her diligent and empathetic spirit of commitment informs every page.
Alanna was dedicated to the work of PUSH, believing that she had an obligation to enlist in a campaign for social justice, dignity for all human beings regardless of their race, religion, or gender, and the poverty relief and shared prosperity that can and should result from humanitarian interventions and more equitable public policy. Witnessing Alanna provided an education in the quiet machinery of democracy. For every heroic leader like Jesse Jackson, and inside the unglamorous offices of every organization striving on behalf of a worthy cause, there are people like my friend – laboring, fighting, thinking, and emptying their hearts into the crucible of democratic engagement and expansion, away from the cameras and without expectation of applause or award. People like Alanna make possible the progression toward justice that has transformed the United States in the 20th Century, and one hopes, will transform it again in the 21st. Even those who support their work with donations and advocacy of their own rarely know their names.
While on the executive staff, Alanna never lost the heart of a volunteer. Rainbow/PUSH has an annual Thanksgiving dinner for poor families, and follows it with a Christmas giveaway of clothing and food. Alanna treated the beneficiaries of PUSH’s charitable work as neighbors, routinely taking their contact information, staying in touch with them for years, and helping them navigate a city, state, and country that are often cruel to anyone without money, power, or influence.
I once told her, “Your dedication makes the world a better place.” There was a fascinating irony to her commitment. Unlike her boss, who coined the phrase, “Keep hope alive,” Alanna did not believe that America was destined to fully realize its potential as a multiracial, ecumenical democracy. One of the last words she spoke to me, with the 2024 presidential campaign in full swing, was “America isn’t going to elect a Black woman as president.” She said it in a matter-of-fact tone, as if nothing were more obvious than Trump’s return to the White House. She also constantly lamented the “rising dominance of mediocrity,” as she called it, arguing that American institutions, from the political and cultural media to universities, were losing sight of the standards that a society should maintain to stay intellectually and morally healthy. Because I fell more into the Jesse Jackson school of thought, placing an emphasis on hope while attempting to keep an eye on the positive, I once asked how she works six days a week, often long hours into the evening, if she doesn’t expect the side of social liberalism and economic fairness to prevail. “Good question,” she said. Typically, an eloquent speaker, words failed her. She sputtered before arriving at, “There isn’t much of a point to anything else.”
Alanna had a Sisyphean joy in the work, rolling her boulder up the hill each day with a smile, waiting for it to slide down in the evening, so that she could awaken and start to sweat again.
Our friendship evolved into something more sophisticated, even aspirational, when my wife, Sarah, met Alanna. Their chemical connection formed with the same instantaneousness as ours. They recognized in each other a fellow traveler through a rough world. Both believers in cultivating intelligence for the purpose of compassionate service, they also shared a general outlook. Sarah is a social worker, toiling on a daily basis to bring belonging, dignity, and opportunity to adults with developmental disabilities. Navigating the morass of an inadequately funded disability services system, the harsh limits of poverty that consistently weigh down the ambitions of families with disabled loved ones, and political discourse that, even in moments of hope and reform, pays little attention to disability and caregiving, Sarah has tempered expectations for structural alteration, and yet, she makes the effort every day. Alanna and Sarah both weighed success by the small moments – the smile on the face of a beneficiary of services, the knowledge that someone is having a better day than the day before. Because they shared a crucible, they also shared a sense of humor. Wry, but not bitter; ironic, but not cynical, they could make each other laugh with ease. I enjoyed observing, and laughing along. One evening over dinner, Alanna confessed, in a jocular tone, that even though she loved us equally, she liked Sarah more.
On a hot and sunny morning, the three of us met for brunch in Chicago. Sitting outside, we remained at our table until after dinnertime hours, seemingly with no idea how much time had passed. Not even the darkening sky could interfere with our concentration on each other. It was an unforgettable day; the kind that Walt Whitman described in a letter to a friend, “Our dear times…were so good, so hearty, those friendship-times, our talk, our knitting together, it may be a whim, but I think nothing could be better or quieter and more happy of the kind—and is there any better kind in life’s experiences?”
Alanna and Sarah, at Alanna’s insistence, determined that they were sisters. In a birthday card for Sarah, Alanna asked when Sarah was going to tell her white family that she had a Black sister. “It’s time!” she wrote next to a smiley face that she drew in blue ink. The birthday message was an opportunity for levity, but Alanna and Sarah would occasionally discuss the power and beauty of an interracial friendship. Despite its diversity, the US does not provide many historical models for multiracial bonds, nor does it even give examples of cross-gender friendship as forces in politics or culture. Our trio was an endless source of personal edification, but it also provided us with a real life model of the work we believed was important, whether it was Alanna’s dedication to Rainbow/PUSH, Sarah’s social work, or my writing about social liberalism, movements for justice, and the expansion of democracy.
Armistead Maupin writes in his memoir, “Sooner or later, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.” Maupin, the author the Tales from the City series and gay rights activist, was not fortunate enough to have a biological family that supported and cared for him. Sarah, Alanna, and I do and did enjoy that blessing. Even still, a supportive biological family does not eradicate the need for a logical family. The three of us were logical family; chosen siblings, forged in the bond of experience and belief. Part of what makes the loss of a friend so devastating is that it feels like a nullification of the choice and labor that you invested into the creation of logical family.
Alanna died at the age of 59, leaving behind a 17-year-old son. Her process of dying resembled Ernest Hemingway’s famous description of bankruptcy: “Gradually, then suddenly.” She was diagnosed with breast cancer, which spread to her brain. Less than a year after receiving her diagnosis, she was gone. There are multiple layers to grieving logical family. There is the immediate pain of haunting; a world suddenly defined by absence more than presence. The universe is suddenly anew in startling and sad shapes and forms. It is a universe without Alanna. There is the self-directed mourning for the loss of an emotional and intellectual reservoir. When you choose a logical family member, you are deliberately allocating your own psychological resources to another person. When that person is gone, you still have the desire to empty out your love and solidarity, but suddenly, the reservoir is invisible. There is nowhere left to pour.
Finally, there is the grief that you not only feel for the loss of the person, but the damage inflicted on what the person stood, fought, and worked to make possible. Alanna’s death removes from Rainbow/PUSH, and the broader cause of racial equality and social justice, a contribution of value that is hard to quantify. That contribution is missing, and the world is poorer for it.
Mourning, then, is not only an acclimation to a new universe, but also navigation of a new form of blindness. The death of a loved one renders us blind. Beginning with the obvious, we can no longer see the person for whom we grieve. Outside of our memories, photos, and dreams, the person has become invisible – no longer in the physical spaces that she once occupied. The absence casts a sad, overwhelming shadow over those streets and rooms. When Sarah and I drove through the neighborhood where Alanna lived for the first time after her death, we found it painful, but also odd. Our strongest association with those businesses, intersections, and road signs – an association that once made the neighborhood hospitable and comfortable – is gone. The same is true for Alanna’s office at Rainbow/PUSH.
The blindness of grief darkens other former vantage points of the psyche. In her fascinating and entertaining book about the love/hate relationship between Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, Lili Anolik writes, “Friendship is, at its most basic level, an act of imaginative sympathy. It means seeing the world through the other person’s eyes.”
My imagination must now work overtime, fighting through the challenges of her absence, to see the world through Alanna’s eyes. Especially because Sarah, Alanna, and I were a trio operating according to the same values and commitments, it is lonely to no longer have the ability to acquire Alanna’s vantage point. In public discourse, there is a tendency to speculate how an inspiring figure of history, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rachel Carson, would react to present-day developments. Even those who knew them can only venture educated guesses. In the months since Alanna’s death, Sarah and I have both uttered, many times, the question, “What would Alanna say?”
The question is tragic, because it is imprisoned as rhetorical.
There is also spiritual damage that accrues due to the loss of someone as gifted and admirable as Alanna seeing the world through my eyes. Her encouragement of my writing, her thoughtful reactions, and her challenging inquiries were a source of pride; a sustainable resource for a career and calling in letters. Sarah suffers from the deprivation of a kindred soul who would listen to her stories, and offer solidarity in response to her frustrations. With Alanna no longer seeing the world through our eyes, our world – the new universe – has receded into smaller dimensions.
It is still there, though – the world, that is – and those who mourn must find a way to engage with it, confront it, and improve it.
The second song that moved me to tears was “Checkin’ It Out” by Van Morrison. Again, in the car, I found myself listening to Morrison’s beautiful 1978 record, Wavelength, for the millionth time. When “Checkin’ It Out,” the second song on the album, began, I was barely paying attention. It is an exercise in late ‘70s pop-rock with melody and rhythm that sneaks up on the listener. It is a good song, but few would rank it among Van’s best. The lyrics are a vague plea with a friend or lover to work through setbacks and hardships. Because they provide no description of the problem or the connection between singer and recipient, the words can function as request or advice. There is the strong impression that something bad has happened, and Morrison is singing about “working it out,” and then “checking it out / taking it further.”
Near the end of its three-and-a-half minutes, the musical arrangement deconstructs, providing only soft accompaniment to Morrison’s whisper, “You meditate.” He repeats it several times, barely audible over the drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, and saxophone. “You meditate…”
As the music kickstarts back into full force, Morrison growls, “And you come back.” He repeats the phrase before blasting out of his lungs and throat a primal shout, “You bring it up now, baby!” He keeps yelling, “You bring it up now, baby!” The band cooperates, playing harder and heavier, until the songs fades into silence.
Morrison’s characteristically emotive and mystical exploration of the substance of life struck me, before I could comprehend it, as an accurate presentation of the limits and opportunities of living with grief. You have no choice but to meditate, reflecting on what it all means, and how one can develop an understanding that allows for “taking it further.” Then, the moment arrives when you have to “come back” and “bring it up” – attacking life with the same enthusiasm, curiosity, and courage that enabled the formation of the friendship in the first place.
The transition from meditation to action is particularly true after the loss of friendships that had a basis in shared values. The confidant, the ally, the collaborator, the friend is gone. But the values are still here, waiting for our affection.
