‘Smoke Your Weed, Baby’: Memories of My Mother’s Truth or D.A.R.E.
February 7, 2020Today is the day my mother’s body expired because it could no longer take the demands of dialysis to manage the serial killer so many black families face—that literal motherfucker diabetes. She left this earth Feb. 7, 2018, and in every moment since, my life has been a series of disbelief, denial, and levels of grief that hold a pain that only her voice can soothe. Memories of her are tools I use to hold my heart intact as it regularly shatters inside of my body. To bring some levity to an otherwise devastating time for me, and because black people are geniuses at laughing through some damn pain, I often come back to the memories of the ways my mama said fuck the state and the war on drugs: “Smoke your weed, baby,” she’d say.