Insideout Living
The Legacy of Silence, and what happens when grief is never given a voice.
Lisa Lackey
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I carry within me a legacy of silence.
My father died by suicide. His father did too.
Their lives were marked by brilliance and burden and also by a grief that was never given voice, never allowed to breathe. The silence swallowed them whole.
Prince once asked us:
How can you just leave me standing
Alone in a world that’s so cold?
When Doves Cry stripped away the bass line, leaving a raw, unsettled, unprotected sound…a mirror of Black men’s emotional landscape when denied the right to grieve.
This is not just my family’s story. It is our communal story.
Today, Black men are dying by suicide at rates that have risen more than 30% in the last decade. Sons, fathers, brothers — men whose vulnerability was never safe enough to surface.
Grief is a human inheritance. And yet here, I’m speaking especially of the silence that Black men carry, because too often, it is overlooked; even within our own communities.
And if you are a Black man reading this, know that your grief is seen here. Your silence is not invisible to me. You deserve space for lament, not just resilience.
Silence this deep asks for a symbol, something that can hold what words cannot. The dove has always been a symbol of peace, spirit, innocence. For doves to cry is to imagine the impossible: the breaking of what was meant to be pure.
When Black men cry — or cannot — the world should stop and listen. Their tears are not weakness. They are sacred signals that grief has become unbearable.
This silence cannot be healed on the page alone. At the close of this series, we will gather live to witness what words cannot fully carry, to honor grief, and to remember that our healing is not solitary work.
Before we reach that moment, I’ll leave you with a few questions to sit with:
How often do we demand resilience from our fathers, brothers, partners, sons, when what they need is room to lament?
What legacies of silence have been passed down in your family line?
As women, how much longer can we carry everyone else’s grief without tending to our own?
The grief of our men, the disappearance of our women, and the silences in between…these ruptures are not the end. They are the beginning of a sacred labor we are called to midwife together.
In the next email: The Hidden Tears of Black Women, where the myth of strength collides with the silence of grief.
P.S. Many women shoulder the double weight of our own hidden struggles and the invisible labor of holding space for the grief of Black men. We’re called “strong,” but strength has too often meant silence, while our bodies whisper: I am tired. I need space too.
This is why I created The Second Knowing™ The Awakening, a circle where women break silence with care, not shame. We begin September 30th.
Step into The Second Knowing™ The Awakening. The details and registration are waiting for you here.