When I designed my loft, I literally framed the World Trade Center as a picture postcard I could see from my bed. I no longer have that image, and I mourn it.
I've had some interesting roles along the way, but they tend to be cause-driven. They're always about something. There isn't time for character work as an actor because you're fighting the cause or mourning the child or fighting the disease, etc.
I mourn the fact that my beautiful country has deteriorated in every way.
It was a huge shock. I've never had hair that short in my life! I think the rest of the cast and crew were mourning my haircut more than I was! But after a while, I felt liberated, I learned to embrace it.
With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn't feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.
Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.
The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.
New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.
The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.
We should not clap our hands and mourn, for he is out of trouble. You are still in it.
