Another Solider Gone
I have a funeral Saturday. His name is Nathan D. Strickland, Jr. He was 28-years-old. After a lengthy battle, one I truly believed he’d survive, he “suddenly” succumbed to cancer. His marks the first death I’ve had in 2019 of a Black man, a fellow brother. He will not be my last. Last year, I experienced the deaths of 20 Black men. Last year I experienced the deaths of 20 Black men. Last year I experienced the death of 20 Black men. This stuttered trifecta of trauma was not a typo. It’s a weight that needs to be restated to be felt, to be heard, to be understood.
Listen.
I am not a soldier in war. I do not belong to a gang in the middle of a turf battle. I am not confined to a poorly operated prison (though Trump’s America can feel like that sometimes). I’m not in the midst of a sudden global contagion. Yet, I know 20 Black men across the U.S. who died within 365 days and only a handful were reported to have died of AIDS-related complications. Cancer led among the contenders, enough to warrant pressing questions about the true quality of the food, air, and water in Black environments; followed by heart disease, then kidney ailments (so many lifetime muscle heads I knew in their prime only to later wither away on dialysis machines), at least two were suicides, and the rest informed by too-often late stage determined HIV. There is and has been an epidemic of Black male deaths, but its causes are more varied than the far more spectacled reports of HIV and homicide, often unspoken, and has reached epic proportions without any mass efforts or organized campaigns to stop it.
Words: L. Michael Gipson