What I learned from losing my first love

Us six months before he died.

May 19, 1991 was the worse day of my life. I stood across the street and saw the gun blast that killed my best friend. The gunman, a guy that we didn’t even know, said in court that he thought he was shooting someone else. A life that was full of so much promise, just wiped out mistakenly. I was 18, at my high school graduation party. He was, Robert Turner, the 20 year old star defensive back of Jackson State University’s football team, there to be with me. He had just set a national record for the most interceptions returned for touchdowns and was named to the NCAA Division 1-AA first team All America. We weren’t even supposed to be there that night. We had just gotten back together and I didn’t feel like being around a lot of people, but he insisted that I not miss my high school graduation party.

As we danced beside my fellow classmates, the song “Make It Last Forever”, by Keith Sweat, blasted through the speakers. He sang it in my ear, “Let me hear you tell me you love me, let me hear you say you’ll never leave me, ooh girl that would make me feel so right… ” He pulled me closer, kissed me and said, “I still love you, do you love me?” Angry from what had happened during our breakup months before, I refused to say it. He asked me over and over again to just tell him that I still loved him. Defiant, I replied, “Nope I don’t love you anymore, you have to earn back my love”. He said, “I will, but I know you do, I just wanna hear you say it”. I refused. Just two hours later, he would be dead.

After years of grieving and contemplation, I realized how this horrific experience continues to shape my life. I hope, in this process of exposing my deepest loss, regrets, and what I learned along the way, that this is helpful to those experiencing grief and reminds us all of what is really important.

1. I became fearless in some ways. For some reason, when I touched his lifeless body at the funeral home, I lost all fear of death. Maybe because I know he will be on the other side waiting for me when its my time to go. But at the same time, I also realized that part of me was scared to live. Not in the sense that I wanted to die, but in the sense of moving forward in romantic relationships without him. I would struggle with that for years.
2. I decided to unapologetically pursue what makes me happy career wise. My parents weren’t too cool with this idea when I sold my townhouse and left my stable corporate job in the pharmaceutical/medical devices industry to move to New York to attend fashion design school at the age of 33. In my mind, I had already lost everything, so why not just do it? I dreamed of being a fashion designer since I was a small child. I bought Vogue magazine with my allowance, and spent hours drawing and dreaming of runways and photoshoots. I am now a shoe designer working in the fashion industry in New York City.
3. I learned that grieving is a process and there is no time limit. Everyone deals with grief in different ways. In my culture, we are taught to suppress unpleasant emotions and to move on quickly. That was the biggest mistake I made. When you avoid emotions that you don’t want to feel, they don’t actually go away, but they subconsciously affect how we relate to others. I realized that I am very guarded and tend to not let people in for fear of being disappointed or abandoned. This has significantly limited my ability to connect with people deeply, especially men. I am aware of this and working on it daily.
4. I was angry for years. Anger is a part of the grieving process. I was angry at Robert for leaving me, for not listening when I told him to go home and not get involved with what was going on that lead to his death. I was angry that I had to emotionally deal with so much stuff because of his actions prior to his death. I was angry with God, not only because he took my man away, but why would He think that I could handle all this at 18 years old? I couldn’t and I didn’t. I was angry because I felt I didn’t have the emotional support that I needed at the time. Nobody understood what I was going through other than his family and close friends, who were all devastated and going through their own grieving, so how could they help me? Even now, I get angry at anyone for even suggesting that I should be over it already. I learned that you have to lean into the feeling. Feel the anger, scream, throw something, shout, hit something…do whatever you can to feel it, breathe through it, so that it can move out of your body. If you don’t, it will fester underneath the surface and rear its ugly head on some unexpected person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, I have lost it on some folks through out the years, and they had no clue why I reacted like a crazy person. It’s because I was.
5. My tolerance for bs is at zero. I physically can’t handle being around unpleasant situations and people. Drama, unreliability, pettiness, or any kind of ongoing negativity in relationships…I just can’t. I immediately distance myself from it and the person causing it with no hesitation and sometimes no explanation.
6. I’ve learned that nothing is worth me not telling my loved ones my true feelings for them. I’ve had to live with the fact that I didn’t say to Robert that I still loved him before he was killed. You can’t let ego or pride get in the way of expressing how you feel to your loved ones. Its not worth it at all. If I could change one thing I did prior to his death, I would scream to the mountain top how much I loved him. I would have told him a million times. I would have said it until he got tired of hearing it.
7. The hardest thing to explain is that I learned that love never dies. I still love him. Although his body is gone, I still feel his presence watching over me. I feel his love from beyond. When our song comes on, I hear him in my ear singing it to me. There were several times when I have physically felt him, the last time was in August 2017 when I visited his grave. As I walked away, I wanted to turn around and look at his headstone one last time, but, I physically could not turn my head, nor could I turn my body. I felt a force, gentle but strong, propel me forward. My back, my arms, and my legs were being ushered forward by a force that I cannot fully explain. I smiled because I knew it was him, embracing me and encouraging me to move forward and to not look back.
8. Finally, I know that I will never get over it. “Getting over it” is a phrase that is so disrespectful to people who are grieving. How do you “get over” loving someone who is not here anymore? How do you “get over” the loss of that person? What I did was learn to live with his absence. When he died, a part of my heart died with him and I will never be the same. What I hope is that I am actually a better person. I hope I am able to express love as freely as he did, and to live in the moment. I hope that my smile lights up a room, like his did. I hope that I can touch people’s lives, like he did. And most importantly, I hope I always remember to focus on what truly matters, and that is LOVE.