My mother has changed the inscription on my grave. She could smell that it was a lie. Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know. Now it says:

VIVEK NNEMDI OJI

BELOVED CHILD

I wanted to be like Malcolm X! Fuck it! Shit! I wanted to be Malcolm X, you know. I was so unhappy that this man was killed. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.

Then one day I sat down at the piano in Sandra’s house. I said to Sandra: “Do you know what? I’ve just been fooling around. I haven’t been playing AFRICAN music. So now I want to write African music … for the first time. I want to try.” Then I started to write and write. In my mind I put a bass here … a piano there. … Then I started humming, then singing. I said to myself, “How do Africans sing songs? They sing with chants. Now let me chant into this song: la-la-la-laaa. …

When I encounter strangers from my tribes, they are startled by my attempts to communicate. They do not recognize me as one of their own. They laugh, charmed and perhaps a little disturbed by the discrepancy between appearance and sound. When I explain myself, they think me a curious hybrid. They speak to me, always, in English.

I remember talking with another Tibetan lama, years later, about how difficult it is for some Westerners to engage with this idea because of how conflicted they are about their own

mothers. “For those people,” the lama said, smiling, “I always say think about your grandmother instead.” He would have approved of my new friend Zeki’s ayahuasca memories!

I don’t think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didn’t ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before her had done, travelled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown of hopes of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost - her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered., but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us.

It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding rows, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, at the nature of ‘what we can handle’ changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.