They Don’t Tell You What It’s Like To Lose A Teacher —On bell hooks & Loving

Mourning someone you’ve never met, but whom you’ve read for years and years, is surprising and strange and sad all at once.

In this culture, we’re hardly prepared to navigate grief and the loss of anyone, let alone those we hold most dear.

But no one ever even told me what it’s like when one of your teachers dies.

There are the people who influence you. And then there are those who shape, hold, and make you.

I never met bell hooks, but when I first encountered her books she was alive. With some of my other favorite writers, that’s not always the case — I’ve moved through the world accompanied by plenty of intellectual and spiritual heroes and role models by virtue of their presence being only on pages. Nietzsche, for example, has long felt like a dear but long-distance friend, from 100 years away.

Writing is writing, right? Yes, and no. At least, not in terms of how we can relate.

There’s a different sense of connectedness when you know the person who wrote the words that fill you still has their breath. It’s not like reading a stranger’s lost diaries or archived memories of someone passed, a retrospective into the life and mind of those who once lived.