The two signs above my desk

The death of a sporting icon can often lead to grief riddled with complexity. Musa Okwonga writes how this complexity can be so personal during times of such tragedy. Please beware, this piece contains some sensitive topics.

I hate helicopters. I hate helicopters so much that the only time I will set foot within one is if the only alternative is certain death. That has long been my feeling about this form of transportation, many years before I heard the news that Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest athletes this globe will ever see, died in a horrifying crash in one of these aircraft alongside his thirteen-year-old daughter and seven other people.

Life is horrifyingly short, and I have long felt that too. Kobe Bryant was forty-one, which means that he was only a few months older than my own father when he died in a helicopter crash in Uganda. Forty-one is no time at all. I am forty years old now, and soon I will be older than my father ever was. If people ever ask why I am in such a hurry, that is why; because until recently I never even imagined living beyond the age of forty.

But even forty-one is an age, an eternity, when compared to thirteen. His poor daughter, my God. Bryant’s poor daughter Gianna. I don’t know what life she would have had and the thought that she and especially the other children in that helicopter now have nothing more to give, will never able to spend another second learning, loving or simply living, is heart-breaking beyond words or measure.

I have two signs above my desk, two yellow Post-It notes which I read every morning as I sit down to write. The first of them, carelessly stained with coffee, reads “We do the best we can in the time that is given to us”. The second one of them, thankfully intact, reads “You are just passing through”. Those signs are there because I have never been complacent about how much time I have on this earth.

An early relationship with death does that to you. My first memory of my father is his coffin in my living room and my second memory of him is the first handful of dirt I lowered onto his grave. He was a hero to me and still is and for the first half of my life you couldn’t tell me a bad thing about him. Later I would learn of his mistakes and despite those, because of those, I try to learn from all that he was, his strengths and his flaws.

“Grief... is a complex matter, and though Bryant’s death makes it so public, it remains intensely personal.”

The shock at Bryant’s death tells you everything about the extent to which he defined our age. Everyone affected by this news will have their own particular memory of him. One of them, for me, will be the sight of his Afro surging through traffic in the depths of the paint, that black flame searing its way to the hoop. This was my favourite Kobe, Afro Kobe, fresh from his teens, and the world before him like a runway.

Yet it is one thing to have the youthful promise of greatness, and quite another to fulfil it. Bryant somehow surpassed even the expectations around him, and he did it with a relentless commitment to excellence in his craft that has inspired and will continue to inspire millions of people for years to come. He symbolised so much to so many. In the weeks and months to come there will be countless voices hoarse from grief. There will be those so overcome they will be unable to weep.

There will also be those who will feel oddly isolated amid the following weeks and months of tributes, who will have a strange hollowness in their guts, perhaps a rage of rare depth, because the Bryant they will remember will be very far from the joyfulness of Afro Kobe, it will be the man who faced allegations of sexual assault in Colorado and settled this disturbing case out of court. Those people cannot be pressured to feel a grief they cannot feel. Their hesitation or outright refusal to erupt into eulogy must be respected. Grief - in both its presence and its absence - is a complex matter, and though Bryant’s death makes it so public it remains intensely personal.

Sudden death is so shocking to us because it is the most vicious reminder that our plans are as fragile as a sandcastle before the onrushing waves. Earlier, on Facebook, I saw a friend reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of meeting his wife, the beginning of a beautiful journey with her, and I thought what a marvel it was that some of us ever get to find so much happiness in the brief time we have here.

I cannot adequately express my sorrow for the abyss that the loss of everyone in that helicopter will leave in the lives of their families and their friends. I can only say that I know that abyss too well, and that it cannot ever be filled, only endured.

That’s why, more than ever, I am thinking of those two signs above my desk. I don’t always live by their principles - that we should value these few moments we have on this planet, and that we should be as compassionate during them as possible. I am more grateful than ever that I still have time, however little, to try to do so. I am devastated for those who do not.

Musa and Ryan discussed this further on the latest Stadio podcast.