A Fact Written in Twilight

Photo of Bessie Louise, age 31, taken by my father,

Floyd Walker, at Pittsburgh's Buhl Plantarium in 1970.

THE TWILIGHT HOURS are good for reflection, where abstract thoughts and memories buried fathoms deep for decades come washing ashore on waves of tears. I hope you don't mind if I share some of these thoughts with you. There will come a point very soon where I'll be speaking about my mother Bessie's physical life in the past tense. But for now, she's still here, and I'd like to honor her by writing about the experience of being in her orbit for so long.

I was sitting next to her bed a couple of nights ago, holding her hand, stroking her face and hair, speaking to her intermittently to remind her I was there, when the magnitude of her presence in my life cascaded through me. My mom exists in me, all the way to the marrow of my bones, in a manner that's inescapable. I actually stopped trying to escape it years ago. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was a kid, one of my cousins would teasingly call me "Little Bessie" when I'd get agitated, and I resented it. This was emasculating talk back then (and although we're gradually purging that mindset from our culture, it still exists in many places); I hated what the association meant from a gendered perspective, but also for other reasons.

My close family and friends know that my mother struggled for the majority of her life with mental health challenges. This wasn't an isolated problem; much like hypertension and diabetes, it didn't run through our extended family, it galloped, preceding and following her. We're learning now as a culture that mental illness is a larger societal problem - there have always been more people afflicted with it than most families have been willing to acknowledge - and it isn't a condition any of us should be ashamed of or blamed for. It's not a curse. It's not a mark of being any less of a celestially-realized miracle than stars and nebulas. But it was dramatic and ongoing, it caused problems, and it eclipsed her more positive qualities far too often.

So, even though I wasn't able to fully articulate it when I was eight or ten or even fifteen, I hated being called "Little Bessie" because it conjured up the notion that I had mental illness in me, at the marrow.

But I had to come to terms with some other realities: I LOOKED like Bessie. I sounded like her, and moved like her. My mannerisms reflected hers. As I got older, even my laugh - which some described in the '80s as an Eddie Murphy laugh - burst out like hers. Friends would meet her and hear her laugh and then laugh themselves because we sounded so much alike. Over the years, I've had plenty of people across Pittsburgh approach me and ask, "Excuse me, I just have to ask...are you Bessie's son?" Or, I'd be introduced to people as "Bessie's son" and I'd watch their eyes immediately spark with recognition and joy. "Of *course* you are...you look just LIKE her!" they'd say.

I'd get that kind of comparison about my Dad and me too sometimes, but I never took it seriously because it was a comparison coming from cultural conditioning. A boy looks like his father, right? So, okay, whatever.

But at eight years old, even when I resented the comparisons, I knew the latter flattery was born out of proximity while, in obvious truth, little Marcel's not-so-secret identity was Little Bessie. And so, I eventually just shrugged and accepted it.

Something I came to understand better as I got older is that the Bessie I'm most strongly connected to is the person who existed before clinical diagnoses and manic episodes had eclipsed her light. Marcel's genetics were more tightly yoked to the high school graduate who got great grades and went on to find employment that impressed her eight older siblings. She dressed impeccably, and was the favorite aunt of her many nieces and nephews. She was talented and had played piano and organ in church since she was a child. Whenever the questions of where she'd learned to play so well or who had taught her came up, the unanimous answer was, "Bessie just always had 'The Gift.'"

And she really did. If you ever heard her play, you know that's a fact.

It could be said that my mother's presence cast a huge shadow over me throughout my life. But cosmic light continues to journey through space and time long after their heavenly bodies of origin have dimmed. Starlight lives on. That's a fact, too. So, even as Bessie's light continues to burn into the great beyond, I'll remain here, able to see it.

I've said to people this past couple of weeks that it feels like I have one foot suspended off the ground, as if gravity is failing me, and I'm about to set foot on an alien planet. Because this won't be the same world without my mom here, somewhere, wondering about my well being. Much like the Earth beneath my feet, so consistently present that often I take each footstep for granted, my mother, Bessie Louise, has been my entire world. I can't escape her orbit. Her gravitational pull remains far too strong.

But I'm trying hard to remember that when I laugh, it's still a little of her music playing and coming to light from this planet.

That's a fact written in twilight. Take it from Little Bessie.