I used to love spring without reservation—warm days, soft rains, and new flowers appearing every week. But the season is more complicated for me now.
I am writing this on June 26, the anniversary of my marriage to Darryl Alladice in 2004. Darryl, who grew up in Harlem and Crown Heights, was a poet and a public school teacher. We were married on a hot day in the living room of our Brooklyn apartment. As I walked down our short hallway, we played The Wedding by South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim on the CD player. We exchanged simple vows before a judge and then took everyone to lunch in Park Slope. A few days later, we “honeymooned” by riding our bikes to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Our lives were not always easy, but we were a team. Darryl wrote about growing up with sickle cell disease, about baseball, and about his family. He died in May 2020, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, 3 weeks before his 66th birthday. His doctor later told me that he had outlived his life expectancy by more than 20 years.
It was the second time I had been widowed.
A few weeks ago, I lit a candle for my first husband, Makanda Ken McIntyre, who died on June 13, 2001. It’s hard to believe that was 25 years ago; it still feels as though he was just here. Makanda grew up in a one-room apartment in Boston’s South End with his parents and sister. He was arrested when he was sixteen. His mother came to the jail to tell him she didn’t have bail money. He later said he could tell from the look in her eyes that he was exactly where she expected him to be. Something inside him cried, “No!!!” and he turned his life around.
Within a few years, he was practicing the saxophone day and night, determined to catch up with Sonny Rollins, who shared his birthday and was only a year older. Makanda often said that without jazz, he would have ended up dead or in jail. Instead, he learned to play 17 wind instruments, became a prolific jazz composer, and eventually a college professor.
I had a different professor, Richard Niebuhr, who used to say that we are each born into a “web of expectations.” Those expectations come from our families, our communities, our teachers, and our peers. We can’t choose what circumstances we are born into, but we can choose how we respond — and that is what counts in life.
Darryl and Makanda each defied expectations and defined their own lives.
These anniversaries are difficult. But more than anything, they remind me to be grateful. I was extraordinarily fortunate to love—and be loved by—two people who accomplished so much with so little. They both learned, early in life, to make a way out of no way.
I miss them every day.
And … I can’t wait to see where life takes me next.