Stay

The effect of Uzo’s Stay is visceral. I cannot speak for the personal motivations or opinions of the artist, but I can communicate something of how Stay spoke to my experience.

Death is an inexorable fact of life. Reminders of its inevitability confront us at every turn, and we learn to compartmentalize and accept its unbreakable promise. We must find a way to free ourselves from the fear of our shared fate, or we will sacrifice the life we are terrified of losing. Particularly in the confidence of youth, it is easiest to resist the anxiety of one’s eventual passing. In the absence of immediate personal danger, death most effectively locks us in a prison of fear and despair when a loved one is dying or dead. We can accept our inability to prevent our future demise far more easily than that of someone important to us.

When my grandmother died of cancer, I was racked with pain and sadness I had never experienced. With time I have come to peace with her absence and learned to celebrate her life more than mourn her death. Over the past six days, I have learned that this lesson is not permanent. Late Thursday afternoon, my father was diagnosed with a deadly terminal disease, the fear of which completely consumed every facet of my life until a few hours ago when we got the news it was a misdiagnosis. If my father had died, the only path forward would be adopting Uzo’s perspective: “learning to live again.” Because the passing of a loved one will stay, as much as one wanted them to stay, the only way to honor their departure and make your stay meaningful is to embrace life. Otherwise, existence becomes living death, and the story ends well before the last word is written.