By Rev. Joshua Henry Narcisse, Idlewild Presbyterian Church
One year ago, I was given the privilege of publicly sharing my thoughts about Memphis, faith and how I see God at work in this city by writing this monthly column.
A terror lingers concerning what folks will think about the thoughts I share. Indeed, at times the comment section has left me feeling a bit bruised.
And yet I remain awed there are folks who even take the time to read my words and offer a response. This chance to write in The Daily Memphian has been an odd and wondrous experience for which I am grateful.
When this opportunity presented itself, the first person I considered it with was my then soon-to-be wife. In fact, my first topic was inspired by her and the fears I was processing as a Downtown resident.
I desperately wanted to keep her safe amid what felt like a wave of shootings and recklessness casting a dark shadow over an otherwise fun and joyous experience of living Downtown.
She helped me to clarify my thoughts and, as always, provided a helpful critique of the first draft of the column. Even if no one else liked what I had to say, she thought it was great.
And I believed her because she was always honest. She did not try to protect my ego. She gave it to me straight because she knew far too many would surround me with platitudes that would run the risk of convincing me of my own greatness. And she wouldn’t abide.
Kayana always offered a different perspective I would eventually realize was better than my own.
On Thursday, May 23, my wife, Kayana Reñeé Marks Narcisse, died. She was 32 years old.
We were preparing to do the things you look forward to as a pastor and as a pastor’s spouse, traveling to a tropical locale to officiate the wedding of some of your best friends, except we never made our flight.
Instead, I sat in the consult room of Methodist University Hospital around 3 a.m., hearing words even three months later still do not make sense, especially after having only 10 years together and six months married.
I am biased, yet I write this without fear of contradiction: Kayana was incomparable. The depth of her humor, the brightness of her smile, the regality of her style, the sharpness of her wit, the beauty of her spirit.
And navigating her loss these past 87 days, as I write, has been inconceivable. I am a preacher at heart, yet this wrenching road has robbed me of my words.
Kayana, for the entire span of our relationship — and before we ever met — set her sights on being a doctor.
For years I watched her study, work, intern and will her way along the journey to medical school. She faced down discouragement upon discouragement: low MCAT scores, anxiety-producing application cycles, the stress of maintaining a job while interning at Church Health for clinical experience.
And I watched her blossom, freed from the weight of it all once she finally got accepted into medical school in January of this year.
She’d even begun to settle on a specialty, something that was eternally difficult for her to do. She decided to become an obstetrician, to do her part to ensure all women in Memphis — Black women in particular — had access to high-quality, compassionate and person-centered maternity care.
In the weeks since her death, I’ve been trying to get my mind around the fullness of losing her. The doctor she would’ve become, the children she would’ve helped usher into this life, the mother she would’ve been to our children, the citizen she would’ve been in this city, the leader she could’ve been in our community.
It all feels incalculable.
But I am not the only one in our city dealing with an incalculable loss. There’s a good chance someone reading this is dealing with one as well. I just happen to have the privilege of writing a Daily Memphian column about it.
There is loss all across our city: the loss of opportunity due to prejudice, the loss of imagination snuffed out by poverty, circumstance or the brain drain that is slowly hollowing out our pool of emerging talent.
And of course there is the loss of lives, whether through an insidious form of violence that shapes far too many of our neighborhoods or the random and unexpected factors that snatch our loved ones away without explanation.
I get to make sure my wife is remembered in this space, along with my own grief. But most of us sit in solitude with our memories and feelings we can’t name, offering silent memorials in our private anguish.
On the one-year occasion of my writing for The Daily Memphian, I write as a 30-year-old widower who is well acquainted with grief and rubbed raw by suffering.
Though I could be considered callow, idealistic, too preachy or Pollyanna, I write with a stubborn belief God is up to something in Memphis.
To be truthful, I don’t get that optimism from God. I am predisposed to pessimism. Kayana was the optimist in our relationship. But recently one of the Scholars at Church Health, a young woman on her way to becoming part of the next generation of medical providers preparing to offer compassionate whole-person care, asked me a question I couldn’t help but answer honestly: “How can you continue to believe that there is someone out there looking out for you, that there is a God that exists in this world?”
I shared with her the only answer that felt honest. I still believe in a God who is sovereign, present and near to me and so many others because I have seen God show up in the faces, hugs, voices, meals and love of so many who have surrounded me in this season of unquantifiable grief and loss.
Most days I can’t sense God the way I once did. It seems those familiar ways of communing with God no longer are accessible to me, at least for now. The lens of grief brings so few things into focus. The past is in freeze frame. The future is shattered. Nothing works right.
Instead, I try to see what is right in front of me, to let that come into focus: my neighbors, the infinitely intricate and beautiful lives I get to pass each day and walk alongside in my work as a pastor.
That is where God is, in the mundane moments of greeting, in the embraces that do not require explanation and in the sacredness of sharing life together.
Those experiences for me underscore the precariousness and preciousness of life that are the reasons for the devastation of loss when it comes.
They also remind me there is no general loss. Each loss is specific. Each is someone created in the image of God and loved by God, and the loss affects all of us, whether we knew the person or not.
For it is a loss to our community, especially when a loss happens so young and so senselessly. We innately look to possibility, and loss robs of what could have been. That is a tragedy.
Not every loss is avoidable of course. As wondrous as the world is, as wondrous as life is, we are frail, mortal creatures. But my own loss makes me keenly consider the question of whether we are losing more than we need to.
We lose too many of our neighbors in this city through the work of our own hands, the work Kayana was committed to addressing.
Lives are still lost to the historic effects of redlining, both financial and environmental. Lives are still lost due to a broken health care system in which the uninsured and unnoticed slip through the cracks. Lives are still lost to the enduring apathy that threatens to stifle the lingering potential of this city.
How often do we take the time to tally up the totality of the losses? The community organizers, musical geniuses, engineers, athletes, entrepreneurs, health care providers and gifts of life and light that are lost because we remain complicit, even passively so, in the systems that exist to only steal life from us?
Though there are some losses we cannot avoid nor stave off, nor explain, we can still embrace life, still embrace possibility, still embrace the potential of what we can do to lessen the factors that contribute to avoidable losses not just in our own families but for everyone who calls Memphis and this world home.
And in doing so, we honor those we have loved and lost.