Mourn Him Again

When on vacation, I always find myself in graveyards. But it’s not death I am searching for—it’s peace. France, Iceland, Armenia, India—it doesn’t matter. When I lived in Russia, I went to several. As I stroll through the rows of tombstones, I feel connected to the ones laid to rest there and, in a larger sense, to all of humanity. One of my favorites is in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. There is a larger-than-life upright marble stone depicting a ballerina balancing on the toes of one foot. The stone belongs to Galina Ulanova, one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century. As I stand in the blistering, snowy gusts of the Russian winter, I watch YouTube clips of her dancing until my iPhone has a mechanical failure due to the cold. That never happened when I visited cemeteries back home.

I come from a very rural part of Deep East Texas, where the pine trees stretch far into the horizon and you can’t drive ten miles without passing a church. Our dead rest in graveyards that we do our best to maintain. Every year during Cemetery Day, we piled into Grandma’s ’95 Lincoln, with me carefully balancing a warm roast pan on my knees, and drove the twenty or so miles to her old community’s graveyard. Grandma’s name is etched next to Granddad’s on the same stone, with a blank space next to “1932–” where her death date will go sometime in the not-too-distant future.

We mow, rake, pick weeds, put down flowers, and spend time telling stories of those who have passed on. The graves show Freemason emblems, military ranks, and shoebox-sized plots for stillborn babies who never even had names. After my dad’s death, a cousin installed a stone in front of Dad’s plot bigger than his. On the dark marble was a laser etching of the grave’s occupant—the beloved family dog.

When my dad died on April Fool’s Day, it felt like God was playing a joke on me. But in all honesty, his death was a relief. He had been suffering for seven years from terminal cancer. In his last days, after the stroke, he could not string four words together, raising his arms every few seconds, like a child asking to be picked up. The people of his church said he was reaching for the angels. People simplify what they struggle to understand.

In my earliest memories of my father, he was already in his early fifties, an older dad. I was his fourth child from his third marriage. I have nephews and nieces older than me. My dad was very different from the man who raised (or failed to raise) my elder brother and sister. The man I knew was kind, funny, and hard-working. He was a God-fearing Christian who had not touched alcohol or tobacco since my birth. He coached my tee-ball team and, as a professional carpenter, built my class a float for the town’s parade. Or at least, that’s who I thought he was.

“Dad was an alcoholic,” my eldest brother told me at the funeral. I could see hurt in his eyes and perhaps something even deeper—envy. I understood the meaning behind his words. I got the good version of Dad. This revelation added a new dimension to my grief. Did I even know the man I was mourning?

Following the funeral, I spent time speaking to Dad’s other relatives and friends—people who knew Dad when he still went by “Lee Roy,” before he shortened it to “Lee” to seem more refined. Lee Roy had been a reckless young man. He spent time in dance halls and in the woods, drunk and hunting with friends, far away from his young wife and two babies. It took years, but I finally came to terms with this added side of him. He aged. He matured. He was a different dad from the one my brother knew. I haven’t talked to my brother since. I don’t hate him. But I don’t want to know any more about Dad’s past. My belief in who Dad was is finally settled. If my brother shared more about Dad in a new conversation today, I would have to renegotiate who he was. I would have to reconstruct this complex human being. I would have to mourn him again.

All of my favorite musicians are dead. After a notable artist passes away, I sometimes like to consider their entire catalog, sitting within each period of their work, inspecting and admiring each piece as a treasured part of a life. I listened to Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh-based hip-hop artist, while he was alive. He was popular in my friend circles and often thrown on in the background of hangouts and parties. Mac and I were about the same age, and it felt like he was always rapping about the stage of life I was currently in. In 2018, he released a few singles for his upcoming album. I was excited for the new direction his art was taking him. And then he died at twenty-six.

I watched and rewatched his NPR Tiny Desk concert, trying to get a peek at who he might have become. I got reacquainted with the Mac of my high school years, Mac at seventeen with his hits “Senior Skip Day” and “Kool-Aid and Frozen Pizza.” Recorded conversations from this era show a fun-loving young man, hungry to make a name for himself. After he established some credibility, he began to experiment with hard drugs. The work he created on what appeared to be the other side of that addiction was my favorite. He included live strings. He sang about life and love rather than death and drugs. I mourned the young man who passed, but also the older man and artist he was becoming. I would never get to see the end of this beautiful new chapter of his life. Like life itself, this burgeoning period had a definitive ending, one cut short. And after a year of navigating his music, interviews, and concerts, I felt I finally had a grasp of him as an artist and a little of the person beneath the surface. I was finally ready to move on, to lay Mac to rest. Then another Mac Miller album came out. For the first time in my life, I was not excited to put it on.

In the past few years, inheritors of artists’ estates like Mac’s have released new music using uncovered audio files and never-before-seen lyrics. Using animators and found footage, posthumous music videos featuring Mac have been released. Watching these videos and listening to the songs, I had to consider how Mac would have felt about it all. Would he have produced something like this had he survived? His later album, Balloonerism, was released in 2025 and had been recorded in 2014, four years before his death, but never released while he was alive. We can’t know whether this is the same album he would have given the world. Instead of considering his life when I play these songs, I only think of his death.

To me, there’s something sacred about watching a dead ballerina pirouette while standing in a place where her loved ones visit her. I wasn’t there, but I have the distance, the separation I need, to feel connected to her memory as I visit her grave and reflect on her life. I don’t get that same experience listening to these later albums. They do not allow what I need to process death—an end. I don’t want to mourn Mac again.