![\"\"](\"https:\/\/chandcounselling.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/3534b8b3-688b-4c22-892b-60e297436500.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMy \u2018nanni\u2019 turned 90 this week. She\u2019s seen it all, she told me recently. I\u2019m<\/em> ready <\/em>were her words, in fact. I winced \u2013 I wince still – and squeezed her hand. She draws my attention to its contours – to sagging skin and veins standing to attention. I attend: I see her hand lovely<\/em>, whispering chronicles of mischief, creativity and labour. Of chapati-rolling. She sees tired and old-looking: she tells me so. I clasp tighter. I can\u2019t remember what I said, or didn\u2019t say. I didn\u2019t and don\u2019t want her to be floating solo in that space-time \u2013 and yet even my very best empathy \u2013 the one all my training was really for – is not up to this moment, this today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luckily my empathy appears superfluous \u2013 she\u2019s moved on. More comfortable terrain for us both? Or just a dip into another register? Either way, thank f***<\/em> I can\u2019t help but think. We\u2019re sat on a bench near an outdoor caf\u00e9 surrounded by parkland, people-watching. This is part of her daily routine. Though a welcome call into the present, I struggle to keep up – my body is still contemplating the contours of her hand and life. But that\u2019s not where we are now. Now<\/em>, we are at SNACK TIME. She reaches into her pocket \u2013 thank you gorgeous hand. It\u2019s not uncommon for the consumable to be housed in an old bread bag. Neither is she against sitting in<\/em> the cafe whilst enjoying \u2018bitings\u2019 from home. This was recently reported to me in real-time on the family WhatsApp group – complete with photo. I laughed a big laugh that day. Sweet relief from sensing bygone yesterdays and disappearing tomorrows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMe and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow\u201d – Toni Morrison<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n I spend plenty of time in the yesterdays: as a therapist, tiptoeing in the past has come also to feel like home. My past, others\u2019 past, or \u2018pastness\u2019, as academic and anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, calls it. Pastness<\/em> being a position that we are never fully out of. On this \u2018constant interplay between present and past[ness]\u2019, I was sold many moons ago. And I am reminded of this today, thinking of Nanni and nudged by a paper titled \u2018Writing Black Beauty\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘Beautiful writing is the form required to develop cartographies of black women\u2019s losses’, the author and academic, Jennifer Nash, argues. The beautiful form, with the potential to move writer and reader alike and differently, are needed as a \u2018strategy for understanding the messy places\u2019, she says (also beautifully). These \u2018messy places\u2019 – these losses – are articulated as ‘absence, erasure, what is missed and missing, what is taken or stolen, what is unknown and unknowable.. experiences of invisibility and dispossession .. institutional arrangements that render black women unseen and disappeared, to describe persistent feelings of loneliness and alienation that are structurally produced..’<\/p>\n\n\n\n The insistence that \u2018loss is only knowable through a proximity to beauty\u2019 resonates in my yesterdays, todays and my sensing of tomorrows. As I flick through the former, my yesterdays, I realise that I have always sought poetry \u2013 in all its less literal forms – when attempting to join someone in their \u2018messy places\u2019. Anything else seems to fall short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nash\u2019s writing centres those with amongst the poorest health and socio-economic outcomes in many societies: black women. Those whose losses \u2013 and riches to be lost – are in a register, or set of registers, of their own. And, the \u2018side by side-ness\u2019 of beauty and loss – as Nash calls it – seems an insight for us all to behold. I see those Nanni-related yesterdays more clearly today. They weren\u2019t capital \u2018B\u2019 beautiful; not a Monet or Sojourner Truth \u2018Aint I a Woman?\u2019 kind. They were quietly beautiful. A feeding-the-ducks kind. My \u2018big laugh\u2019 was actually a big love \u2013 knitted and knotted with grief that Nanni has \u2018more yesterday than anybody\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" – Jennifer Nash My \u2018nanni\u2019 turned 90 this week. She\u2019s seen it all, she told me recently. I\u2019m ready were her words, in fact. I winced \u2013 I wince still – and squeezed her hand. She draws my attention to its contours – to sagging skin and veins standing to attention. I attend: I see … <\/p>\n