Grief Lessens But Never Disappears

The first time I saw Bill Cosby was in black and white on a TV screen a cute, dark guy who had a major role on network television back when you never saw “Negroes” there.

Mom had called me into the living room, crying, “He looks just like your brother!”

Wow, I thought. The “I Spy” guy looks like Darrell!

That was so long ago. It was before I knew there could be places in a human soul that yawn wide and deep and stretch for miles and yet seldom are visited. It was before Darrell became such a place.

I describe my older brother as a place rather than a person because he stopped being a part of my exterior life 20 years ago. His death in 1977 hurled him into an inner landscape wholly unprepared for him.

I spent so long hurting there, so many years measuring and poking into the hole his death had made inside me that I thought I’d never rest.

Bill Cosby, I bet, feels he will never rest.

Since his son was killed Jan. 16, I - like other members of a terrible club - have wished to tell him I understand. We have wanted him to know that as the years pass, even committed grievers create other landscapes - for me, a husband, children, a career and the accompanying baggage. The chasm of my brother has filled in enough that I can skip over it for months at a time.

Then something trips me back into the hole. Something like Ennis Cosby’s murder.

And though it’s presumptuous for me to feel I know some of what the entertainer’s family is enduring, I can’t help it. Neither, I suspect, can a million other people.

The Cosbys have joined a club my family joined years ago, that Michael Jordan joined after two guys stumbled upon his father asleep in his car. The club has neither perks nor privileges, yet it has far too many members. Each has lost a son, a sister, some beloved relative to violence. Each wishes no one else ever had to join.

My brother Bruce was 19 when Darrell, 26, died after being shot by two Gary, Ind., police officers who said he had attacked them with a brick and a chain. An inquest exonerated the policemen, both white, who later left the force in disgrace.

My family never will know what really happened with my gentle brother, an aspiring comedian who had no criminal record. But among his legacies, says Bruce, 38, is an exaggerated respect for police: “I ‘yes, sir’ them to death; I talk them through my every move, saying, ‘I am reaching toward my wallet, unless you’d rather do it.”’

Bruce, a struggling Los Angeles musician who lives just blocks from where Ennis Cosby died, said Cosby’s death was like Darrell’s: “a violent crime in a family you didn’t think would be visited by that.”

“I recalled how very frightened I was,” Bruce said. “… It was my first awareness of how dangerous it is to be young and black.”

But my parents bore the worst of it. A child dying before his or her parents is obscenely wrong, as I was reminded by my mother who, when I phoned her about Ennis Cosby’s death, clearly needed to express what it evoked.

“To lose a child is … without equal in how it affects you,” she began. “Your father and I had put everything in our children’s path we thought was positive; we’d done our utmost to protect you. And we failed.

“The morning after Darrell died,” she continued, “I woke up and realized that for the rest of my life, he would be dead. That it was over. … You realized there was no going back, no retrenching, no rethinking. It was over.

“And that you had lost someone as dear to you as your own breath.”

Listening, I couldn’t breathe; salt stung my eyes. It hurts too much, revisiting the hole.

Mom, unaware, continued.

“I was as near to insane as a human being could be. … It’s like you’re in a hole - a deep, dark hole.”

Yes. Yet today, the hole is smaller and the conviction is larger that Darrell remains with us.

Bruce sees him in his music: “Darrell always told me I was talented and I’d make it in music.”

I see him in my own sons, whom Darrell never saw but whose love for me and whose cracked senses of humor mirror his.

As though my mom knows the anguish that Bill Cosby is in for, she, like millions of other club members, would like to tell him there’s more.

“I’d say: ‘Mr. Cosby, my son looked like you and wanted to emulate you. Thousands of us mothers and fathers who don’t know why someone would waste our child’s valuable life hurt with you. …

“‘Down the road, there’ll be a day when you’ll go all day and not think about it. It will get better.

“‘But it will always be with you.”’

xxxx