The death of a conversation
The way we have these conversations isn’t supposed to be easy. And we haven’t really had to reconcile a life and inescapable legacy like Kobe Bryant’s to acts of violence and trauma posthumously. Certainly not with a death that came so violently. It dredges up parameters of courtesy, of respect, things can feel suddenly off-limits that were at best messy in life. You could’ve hated Bryant as a perpetrator of a very intimate kind of violence, as someone who went on to reap the benefits of rape culture in his incessant comebacks, and still feel shock and sorrow—and the confusion of that shock and sorrow— for the way in which he died.
The internet and its roving arms of social media give us so much cumulative grief, access to groundswells we only would have ever experienced as intimately prior to its inception had we been in communities directly affected by tragedy and trauma. But it hasn’t made us any better at navigating with care or tenderness all the individual stories that make up these swamping surges. Maybe because we aren’t meant to absorb that volume of emotion, so our brains try to crop it to something easier to calculate. Or revert to glancing contact—picking one detail out we know how to deal with because we have done it before. Maybe it is a matter of protection, piling sandbags up against the encroaching flood even knowing it won’t be enough, but not yet knowing a better, less reactive, means of preservation.
The urge to flatten a life lived to better preserve it once it’s over, to remove from it the complications that made it a life in the first place. To make Bryant either a hero, a representation of singular will, or to villainize him, the representation of a different kind of singular will, one above the consent of another, in the desire to freeze for all time not a person, but the myth of one. On the surface it serves to simplify for the sake of representation. It is an easier way to talk about someone whose name has come to be the starting gun of an argument. But to smooth out a life like this makes our own comprehension a little less vivid; our compassion, unchallenged, not quite as strong.
We have gotten so good at reacting. Casting out irrevocably those found accused of harm. Part of it, I think, comes from decades of doing nothing when violence was not just uncovered, but done in plain sight. There is a furious—needed—sense of never again that requires the relinquishing of a previously drawn framework. Partially because that framework is antiquated, but more-so that to make a new one, you have to go beyond the scope of what makes sense now and see years past this moment, and to do that you need power. Power as momentum and power as defence. But the thing about it, the thing we haven’t gotten good at, is using kindness as a measure when figuring out the distance forward. Sometimes it feels too early for kindness, when you look back at what’s happened, when you look around at what’s still happening. There are ways, without looking very hard, that you can feel fury every day for the same kind of violence Bryant committed. But that kind of violence, the way it has historically slid around with an almost demure freedom of movement, is easy. Silencing someone, through fear, intimidation, erasure, will always be faster. What is hard and slow is care and inclusion, questioning, and all the frustrating false-starts involved in difficult conversations.
Not wanting to take on that work is fine too. I mean in some, many, most ways, we are barely equipped for it. We have only just gotten here. But you need to be responsible in relinquishing it as well. If you’re going to withdraw, then you can’t fix snares from the sidelines. You have to take the same care in stepping away as you would in attempting to move things forward. Reacting has made us so compelled to always say something, to assume that someone is waiting to hear from us. Silence can be uncomfortable, but you get to know yourself in it.
At Richard’s father’s funeral, one of his uncles got up to give a eulogy. It was rambling as far as where it went, off-road in his memory in big loops and circles, out and back. Punctuated by long heaves of him getting his breath back. His son, who had gone up as a proxy in case he couldn’t get through it, at one point glanced at the lectern and then out at the crowd and announced, “He’s gone off-script, folks.”
He started to tell a story. He and his brother, Richard’s dad, coming home when they were kids to their mother shut away up in their parents room, inconsolable. Their father came down and told them carefully but honestly that their grandmother, their mother’s mum, had been found in the interior of B.C., in the one desert Canada has. She had been missing from her seniors home for weeks. But more than that, her remains had been disturbed by a bear. Rich’s uncle said it like that, low and dark. He had his head down and the whole room held its breath, wondering what the appropriate response should be now to this excavated trauma over present grief.
But then he started laughing. This forbidden chuckle that grew into the kind of laugh you can’t get a word around edgewise. Our grandma, he heaved, had been eaten by a bear.
The room erupted. Picturing them as kids laughing at the news and, his uncle said, their dad had started laughing too. Because how, sometimes, can anyone handle the unimaginable any other way? The wash in the room was relief but more than that, what the story did was bore a hole all the way back everyone could look down into the history of a life lived and what had made it up so formatively. Richard and his family are some of the funniest people I know, but darkly, macabre. The unfairness of what had happened to Richard’s dad was never the focus. Not at the funeral and not through the last years of his life. A lock-step advancing MS that took out legs from a man who was an athlete; arms from a man who was always reaching for invention, for his family; then memories and voice; fast enough that it couldn’t be slowed but with a cruel leisure so every absence was noted. Still, the line in every story told that tied them all together and in with his life was yes, resilience, but more than that, finding comfort in the incredulity of life. How the mirror of Why is always Why Not, how overwhelming that knowledge can be, crushing in the kind of fear it can trigger, but also how freeing. Relief can be as easy as someone laying their hand over yours, a badly timed joke to puncture air that seemed impenetrable, being more free with telling people how you feel about them, in letting what can be set loose go.
How Richard’s uncle’s story went around and back, didn’t seem to follow anything linear and landed on deranged joy out of what was conceivably darkest, all of that, it’s only life.
A complicated legacy is also a life. Just a life.
Would Kobe have ever acknowledged the assault? Called it by name? Understood how every new avenue of success, every new venture that didn’t force a referential caveat to harm he caused, that unwound from all the ways he continued to reinvent himself was like erasure anew? See how he gave a model for athletes to follow and find success in his footsteps in this other, awful way, even if it was in no way his intention? Would we have ever had a better conversation, a better chance of a conversation, around acts of trauma with him included in the dialogue?
It might all just be revisionist, but it is human nature to tell stories, even to reimagine life in the absence of someone’s. We mythologized every other aspect of Kobe’s potential without any proof past his personality, his drive, that the small shred of hope for this—even knowing this was the man who built his rebrand on how difficult the rape case made things for him—seems just as possible in the grand scheme of a life.
We can all go on talking now, but there is no chance in him talking back.
At the funeral, in a tiny church hallway crammed with coats is where I first heard about the helicopter crash. I had pulled my phone from my purse and saw a string of texts without context, no name. I murmured to Dylan that something must have happened. He found it much faster, “Kobe Bryant died”. Our voices, the news, absorbed by all the winter jackets crammed tightly into the wheeled-in coat racks around us.
It felt, immediately, impossible.
Even in that setting, or maybe because of it, my head struggled around the abruptness. However you felt about him, there was a relentless longevity to man or persona, the rate at which one eclipsed the other steady as lunar phases. There was a familiarity in the repetition of our reactions, too. The arguments surrounding him stuck on the same rhythms, from willful ignorance to heated denial of his assault charges, a glowing profile or piece interrogating his past when he inevitably ventured into another stage of reinvention. That the conversation seemed endless, exhaustingly so regardless of what side you were on, was an extension of him.
Being critical of Bryant could exist in equal measure to his success because his legacy was still intact. It made those who would otherwise be unwilling to engage be at least open to listening because the fallback was always the steadiness of Bryant’s continued trajectory, problematic or not. With the speed and violence of his death it feels as if the oxygen, the life, of the facets of these conversations have also met a forced end.
Later, walking down Yonge Street in the freezing rain, the sky slinking toward night, we found out about the girls on the helicopter. Thirteen years old. My legs wobbled, something in my gut slipped. Headlights from cars rushing north swished across my legs, bright and dark, promise and pitch, there then gone. What seems cruel in the world can always turn, find a new edge.
We struggle so much to find ways to have these conversations comfortably, around the weight of a legacy or a life or the extensions of it. Kobe’s role as a father, a partner, an athlete, a person who at one point could still be all those things and also capable of harm, of nearly dismantling a life in the fallout of that harm, of trying on and liking the narrative of a survivor so much that he shaped a dark mantle of it for himself.
We all walk out the door and become a person different than who we just left inside. Moving through the world by slipping in and out of every role we play, some that work in tandem, supporting another, others that are solitary, maybe not so admirable. We expect that the people we love as much as people we barely know understand we contain all these variations, and that they hold room for us to live out the possibilities of each and every action those variations could entail.
With our heroes, or those we objectively hate, we only want for them to be one or the other. Good or bad and only capable of the same. To make these demands on a life is to effectively kill the conversation and along with it, any hope of arriving at a place on which to build better and stronger foundations for ourselves.
The compulsion to be tender is correct in response to collective grief, public or private. You can honour that compulsion and remain questioning of violence, remain, to the best of your ability, open. Compassion looking back in the mirror at cruelty, why and why not.