Tag: grief (page 1 of 1)

Photo of whole crab in black bean sauce served in a rustic clay pot, garnished with sliced green onions, with chopsticks resting across the rim. Shallow depth of field, muted background. Photo by Vernon Raineil Cenzon.
April 25, 2026 / 0 Comments

Earthly Treats

Crab in black bean sauce, at least as it is served in American Chinese restaurants, starts with a whole crab, most likely Dungeness here in LA, still in the shell, chopped into sections, and stir‑fried until the shells are bright red. It’s then simmered in a fermented black bean sauce. The sticky, unctuous umami bomb was among my father’s very favorite meals.

We observed his birthday this past week as a family by ordering a take-out feast in which this signature dish took center stage. As we sat around my mother’s dining room table, sharing updates on the extended family, job interviews, what’s going on in our fair city, and anything else that came to mind, I imagined my dad there with us, listening and smiling as was common in these kinds of situations, content with letting the loudest voices in the room ramble on from topic-to-topic as love, friendship, and warmth filled the space.

While I’m sure we all had at least a bit of melancholy visit us on that day, it didn’t find me when we were together. 

Dave McMurray, a Detroit-born saxophonist, composer, and bandleader whose decades-long career spans jazz, rock, R&B, funk, and pop and includes work as a sideman with artists like Albert King, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, offers a thesis statement about dealing with grief right at the start of his late 2025 release, I LOVE LIFE even when I’m hurting.

“I know despair don’t care, but be strong!”

It’s a matter-of-fact recognition of truth rather than an exclamation, yet it still stings like an unexpected slap back from the brink. McMurray’s album has been my soundtrack for finding a grounded sense of hope and optimism when those feelings of sadness and loss compound.

Throughout the work, he uses his mastery of the genre to show where and how he finds the will to keep going: in a smile, a joke, or a kind word (even if not explicitly for him), in music that can ignite something within. Beyond “This Life” and the title track, I’m drawn to “We Got By,” a cover of the tune from Al Jarreau’s debut album, with neo-soul vocalist Kem joining McMurray, honoring a lineage of Black resilience. The track is immediately followed by a cover of Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom” that knocks my socks off. McMurray picks up the flute here, and the performance never fails at lifting my spirits.

I first became aware of McMurray as a sideman on Kem’s debut album Kemistry, the 2003 release by the also Detroit-born singer and songwriter whose warm, romantic songwriting helped define a quieter, emotionally grounded lane of early-2000s R&B. Kemistry returned to regular rotation around this time last year because it was a connection between a friend who died unexpectedly and me. 

The opposite of staying stuck in that loop of sadness and despair is to turn to our creative sensibilities. A loss of his own inspired McMurray to say, “I love life even when I’m hurting.” He told Downbeat Magazine’s Bill Murkowski that, a month later, he’d write the track of the same name as a way to give form to what he had been feeling.

The opening track, This Life, was written last. While its original intention was to reckon with physical trauma, that same pain he’d seen in a friend that inspired the title song, he now sees its connection to the precariousness of this cultural and political moment, both at home and abroad.

It is difficult these days to escape the doomscrolling. With a flick of my thumb, real-world turmoil—uncertainty, anxiety, and violence that feels both distant and imminent—plays on an endless loop.

On one of the social media apps, a painter I don’t know asked, “Does art really matter right now?”

A friend replied to her with a quote from the American writer, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara:

“The role of art is to make revolution irresistible.”

As McMurray’s work reminds us, living is not optional. Loving is not frivolous. Optimism is not a luxury reserved for easier times. Creating transforms that which ails us into something that might heal those wounds.

And sometimes you’re mended by wishing a silent happy birthday to your father while sharing one of his favorite earthly treats with the people he loved most.

four people holding hands and dancing in a circle with big smiles on their faces
November 2, 2025 / 2 Comments

Shake what your mama gave ya

As we tumbled out of BB King’s on Beale Street after a night of celebration, a family friend said, “This may be the drinks talking, but I never saw you dance with your mother.”

I had danced with her—there’s photographic proof—but she wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t danced much that night.

There was a time when I was always the first on the dance floor. My mother tried to awaken that version of me when Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” came on.

But the dancing machine would not be roused.

I could offer excuses: my age, my weight, the era of constant surveillance and online judgment. But the truth is more straightforward, and harder.

I’ve struggled to find unabashed joy these past few years. And dancing, sweaty, silly, all-in dancing, has always been my most authentic expression of that relentless, unyielding, undeniable pleasure.

One of my mantras this year is get over yourself.

Another: don’t let these motherfuckers steal your sunshine.

When I don’t dance, especially with the people I love most, I’m not honoring the goals and values I’ve set for myself.

Worse, I’m not being true to who I am.

And worst of all, I’m letting the onslaught of negativity win.

No, ma’am.

I recently caught a clip from The Grits & Eggs Podcast about the power of Black joy: how it remains both antidote and anathema to the race-based authoritarianism rising around us.

It felt like a challenge.

So with two months left in the year, let’s shake what our mamas gave us.

Red and blue fireworks over a night sky
Photo by Jingda Chen on Unsplash
May 20, 2025 / 2 Comments

Burn Bright

The night we learned of her passing in February, blue and red fireworks burst over Universal Studios. As I drove down Olive Avenue, I thought of Shannon Mahoney—her shockingly cerulean eyes and crimson locks blazed with the same fierce energy. She was a force of joy, righteousness, friendship, and fight. The sky would be streaked with light a few more times before I turned right on Alameda, and the Burbank skyline obscured my view. I smiled. I sighed. I let the tears dry on their own.

That day, we sat in shock, spun records, shared stories, and acknowledged that life can slip away at this age, not to a calamity or a villain, but simply because it is time. There’s nothing to rail against, be angry with, or blame. Our friend was gone—and that truth still takes my breath away.

Yesterday, we gathered again for her memorial service in Hayward, California. Person after person who spoke mentioned her fierceness. That was her way. Anna shared that Shannon once pushed her into the bushes because she was concerned about a suspicious white van parked further up their path. As her brother Dallon said, she lived her values. 

All that was on display the last time I saw Shannon: in San Diego in May of last year for Anna’s surprise birthday. The whole event and weekend were great, but seeing Shannon was the highlight. I hadn’t seen my friend since before the pandemic, but being in her presence always felt like coming home. We hugged, laughed, and caught up like no time had passed.

Time does pass, however. I still can’t believe that someone so full of life, generous of spirit, and necessary in today’s fractured world is gone. Who picks up where she left off?

I’m reminded of some twenty years ago when I was then, just as now, lamenting the state of American politics. “Why is there no one willing to fight for what’s right? Who will speak up for the least of us?” I said.

With those piercing eyes and that well-defined clarity of purpose, Shannon didn’t miss a beat.

“It’s us.”

Her answer wasn’t just a rebuke but a call to action. We shouldn’t look for others to bring forth a just world full of radical empathy and fiery love for one another; we only need to be willing to pick up the torch.

It’s us—burn bright, spark joy, and be great by doing good, just like Shannon Sheila Mahoney.

Kevin Toney smiles and laughs as he pays a piano
March 18, 2025 / 0 Comments

A Morning with Kevin Toney and Friends

Lush Life, the first song on my father’s final album, runs eight minutes and eight seconds long. The live recording is billed as Kevin Toney and Friends, but this opening salvo is about him. Besides his adept command of the ivories, you only hear laughter as he improvises playfully in parts. Then, at the end, he speaks, his voice as confident and bright as his performance, like rays of morning sunlight. I’m listening to the whole album as I type this.

It’s the first anniversary of his death today. As clouds, cold, wind, and rain arrived in Los Angeles last week, so did melancholy. It has been nearly a week since I wrote in my journal, avoiding whatever emotion might escape from my fingers on the keyboard I’m most comfortable playing. I have been replaying last year’s events, imagining them as giant dominoes tumbling and unable to escape their path. I hear each block fall, the sound echoing in my ears, the shadow and threat growing ever larger. As it happened, I worried about the weight of it all. I worried so much that my body expressed it as ailments, first shingles and then appendicitis. However, when my mother called to tell me the news, I wasn’t crushed under those tumbling blocks; I was uplifted by the relief that his suffering was over. 

Grief is a never-ending journey, however, and that weight has returned. There is so much uncertainty in the world, and it is the terrible realization that one of the things I am sure of is that Kevin Toney isn’t here to experience it with us. While he brought joy to so many through his music, I am mourning his absence in our family’s everyday lives. His exuberance for youthful delights and overt expressions of love are absent. We have our memories, and we may seek to substitute what he did and how he did it with our versions, but my dad’s way was his way, and there’s no replacing that, no matter how much we might want it.

My sister has entered the recording and is performing a jazzy rendition of her song I Can’t Take That. The song is about the end of a romance with the lyrics, “Hurt doesn’t go away, the memories will never fade.” Later, she vamps and riffs around the refrain, “It left me distraught.” 

Tears aren’t easy for me, but this sadness is worth crying over. Yesterday evening, as the sun set and I sat in my car in a scene reminiscent of Monday, March 18th, 2024, when that fateful call came, I accepted my feelings and allowed them in. There was nothing to do but to be with that hurt and submit to its heft. I was neither crushed by the weight of that pain nor comforted. 

I was, and grief was. I am, and grief is.

This morning, though, with light coming through my windows, there was something else: a desire to hear his voice and his gifts. Kevin Toney and his friends are performing Duke Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood. There is one more song left on this live recording. My father is acknowledging Azar Lawrence on saxophone as the crowd cheers. 

That’s it. 

While I may be in a sentimental mood at this moment, I’m no longer distraught. Those giant dominoes have been replaced with the black and white patterns of piano keys, and with my dad at the helm, what emanates is never a threat. 

Kevin Toney’s legacy is a sound of love.

December 31, 2024 / 0 Comments

2024 in Review – Symptom of Life

It is rare for words to fail me, but I’m struggling to sum up this year.

Here’s what I’ve felt: 

  • Self-doubt 
  • Anxiety
  • Frustration 
  • Sick
  • Grief

 Grief is always lurking on the outer edges of everything.

We keep it pushin’, though.

I have considered this conversation between Andrew Garfield and Elmo since it was published in October.

Even though sadness is always present, remembering that grief is a privilege for those who have experienced love brings me back to the path of joy.

It was a privilege to be loved by my father.

It was a privilege to experience the love and kindness of so many in the prelude and epilogue of his death.

Instead of analyzing all the ups and downs of 2024, I will honor and celebrate all the compassion, empathy, and warmth I was given.

We got to love.

We get to love.

Life goes on.

October 7, 2024 / 0 Comments

This is It

I did not arrive at the Saban Media Center at the Television Academy in North Hollywood on Saturday expecting to be emotional. The event was a Table Read of the final three episodes of season four of the One Day at a Time revival. COVID-19 shut down production, and the show was canceled, so these episodes never got made, and we were deprived of one of the best traditional sitcoms of the last decade and one most reflective of Norman Lear’s creative principles.

I started crying during the introduction video. 

Lear has long been an inspiration of mine, and that love for humanity, the arts, and civic duty caught me off guard. His words, work, and commitment to ensuring all kinds of families are honored, respected, protected, and seen in this American experiment also matter to me. 

After brief remarks from a representative of The People for the American Way, Mike Royce and Gloria Calderón Kellett explained how the afternoon’s event would go, and then the complete title sequence was presented on screen, performed by Gloria Estefan.

This is it. (oh-oh-oh-oh)
This is life, the one you get
So go and have a ball. 

This is it.
Straight ahead and rest assured
You can’t be sure at all. 

So, while you’re here, enjoy the view
Keep on doing what you do
Hold on tight. We’ll muddle through
One day at a time. 

So up on your feet. (Pa’ arriba!)
Somewhere, there’s music playing.
Don’t you worry none
We’ll just take it like it comes. 

One day at a time! One day at a time!
One day at a time. (Un día a la vez, lo tomas un día a la vez).
One day at a time, one day at a time.
One day at a time!

As the lights came back up, my nose was runny, and I was desperate for a tissue to dab my eyes. We would go on to laugh uproariously for the next two hours as Rita Moreno, Isabella Gomez, Todd Grinnell, Justina Machado, Marcel Ruiz, and Stephen Tobolowsky reminded us how good they are and how funny and poignant this show was and is.

Despite the laughs, I didn’t stop crying until the final ovation. Family had been at the top of my mind all day before we arrived at the show. As I did my Saturday morning ritual of reviewing what music I had been listening to recently, I realized Cleo Sol had returned to the top of my spins. A year before, her album Gold was what I would listen to on my daily commutes to visit my dad in the hospital. Without consciously thinking about it, I had already begun to revisit that series of terrible events that would dominate the final months of 2023.

One of the three episodes the cast performed was titled “Best Birthday Ever!” and featured Rita Moreno’s Lydia uncharacteristically sad and unwilling to celebrate herself. Throughout the episode, we learn that she’s mourning the loss of keepsakes from her childhood in Cuba and the possibility that she will never get to see these images or hear sounds from that time. By the end, she is treated to the experience of hearing her mother’s voice for the first time since her death, and it fills her with joy.

I suspect I will go through similar whirlwinds of emotion over the next few months. I remember last fall viscerally, and if this weekend is any indication, my feelings will be turned all the way on, and that’s fine.

All emotions are welcome. Let’s feel all the feelings. I just don’t want to get lost in the sads. Much like at the Table Read, I want to balance the melancholy with opportunities for joy.

More laughing through the tears, please.

This is it.

June 16, 2024 / 0 Comments

Alive in the Room

This past Wednesday, my family hosted a musical tribute to my father, Kevin Toney. I wasn’t an active participant in the production or planning. Outside of doing half of a rough draft of a script for the M.C., I tapped out.

“This is not for us,” I said. “This is for everyone else.”

It was more than that, of course. It was my mother’s gift to his musical legacy. The show was a retrospective of his work in a way he had not done during his life. It spanned eras and genres. It merged his faith with his soul-stirring compositions.

It was expertly performed by his talented friends and loved ones, including my sister, Dominique Toney. Video of him talking about and performing his work played throughout, allowing him to speak for himself even though he was gone.

Despite this spectacular show, it couldn’t give me the one thing I wanted: Kevin Toney alive in the room.

The show closed with a video of my dad alone on stage at a piano. The audience can’t be seen, but you can feel their presence. They are in awe as his outstretched fingers glide across the keys. It’s Kevin Toney, the entertainer, in all his glory. One foot is on the pedals, and the other rests under the bench. He was tall with long arms, so he leaned away from the instrument, giving himself room to move. I watch as he hears the sounds in his head before they exit from the strings on the piano. A phone rings. It’s his. It’s my mom. He finally banters with the crowd a little bit, and they chuckle at this break in seriousness from the maestro. He turns back to the piano and closes with a flourish.

It’s quintessentially him, and what I felt intensely in that moment was his absence.

Everyone did right by him, but Kevin Toney was not on that stage. My father is gone.

In the three months since he passed, the primary feeling I have had is relief. I’ve been relieved that he was no longer in a hospital attached to machines and stuck in bed. I’ve been relieved that the stress of being his advocate was no longer a burden for my mom. I’ve been relieved not to make myself physically sick with worry for all of us. I’ve been relieved for life to be taken off pause.

I’d been dreading the show, though, as I sensed some new emotions creeping in as it approached: sadness and loss.

During the tribute, a montage of photos was played on the video screens. One image took my breath away: a picture from my parents’ wedding reception. My father shared the frame with my grandmother and my uncle, Mike.

Michael Saunders and Kevin Toney are the two most influential men in my life, and they are both gone now.

On this Father’s Day, I’m allowing that reality to wash over me and accepting this next stage of grief.

In what ways is my life a tribute to theirs while I’m the one alive in the room?

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February 2, 2020 / 0 Comments

Overtime

“Shit, I didn’t take a break I broke. Broke my heart, broke my soul, don’t cry for me, though.”

— Big Sean, Overtime

There are few things I love more than Los Angeles and basketball. It’s been exactly seven days since those two things, and much of the world-at-large has been in shock and mourning of the deaths of Kobe Bryant, his basketball prodigy daughter, Gigi, and seven other people in a senseless helicopter crash.

The earth kept spinning, and meaningful events have happened in news and politics since but my mind, my conversations, my dreams have found only this thing to be of consequence in the last week.

From the moment it happened, it has been a constant topic in my work. We’ve covered the story, and it’s aftermath exhaustively and effectively on etonline.com. It ran through the GRAMMYs ceremony that night. Audiences have come to us in large numbers looking for news and context. Some were hoping we’ll help them make sense of it all. Others were wishing we’d turn away from it. Most, I imagine, knowing we can’t and shouldn’t. That it’s our responsibility to write and report and produce our way through it.

My job is to lead teams that report on how these things are performing. What are the numbers behind it all? What do those numbers mean? The numbers have stirred emotion. How to acknowledge record-breaking performance that is in response to tragedy? We want to celebrate our effectiveness and the quality of the work, but this is not something to which you raise your glasses. Every celebrity death or tragic event is like this, but somehow, this feels different.

A few hours after it happened, I got up from my computer and walked to the store needing a break from the rumors and crazy in the hours after the news broke. The city was already beginning to fill with melancholy. The neighborhood felt eerily quiet. The usual din of Trader Joe’s was muted. My cashier asked me if I’d heard the news and then told me that she had been getting some shots up at the park right before coming into work. On her last shot, she yelled, “KOBE!” and it went in. Then she got to the store, and a colleague told her the news.

Another of her co-workers had been sent home early after it was clear he wasn’t going to be able to stop sobbing any time soon.

I haven’t been able to watch any basketball since the crash, not even highlights. I’ve kept up with some NBA scores, but does this season even matter any more? In a season where the Lakers have finally returned to glory and, for the first time, had a legit in-town rival in the Clippers, there was an energy around men’s basketball we hadn’t seen in a while. Now, do we care? The primary storyline of this NBA season has been derailed. Now, the only real question is how will the league, it’s players, and the culture around basketball honor one of it’s most beloved and influential stars, gone too soon?

The Lakers are the center of the NBA universe, and Kobe had become the essence of what it meant to be a Laker. Of course, there’s Magic and Jerry and Kareem, but for most of the last twenty years, the face of the franchise was employee number 8. I didn’t love or even really like Kobe the player or the person he was during most of his playing career. He was well on his way to winning me over in his retirement, though. The grim discipline and determination that marked his NBA years had shifted to joy and vitality and passion for being a great parent, a good neighbor, and a lover of the game in all its forms—especially the women’s game.

These are all things I respect and appreciate in others. Bryant and his daughter had so integrated themselves into the fabric and rhythms of the culture of basketball that matters most to me that they had become constants.

Aside: as I write this with music on shuffle, RJ & Choice’s Get Rich is playing. Choice raps

“And we never going back, so I know it’s clear
Call the teller every night, so I know it’s there
Only find truth in your account and in your mirror
Counting checks cause I’m deaf n—-a Kobe stare”

We attended several of the same games in the last twelve months. They had recently become a meme popular among women’s basketball fans. Gigi was a regular in basketball highlights. They were vibrant. They were alive.

And then they weren’t.

As my barber cut my hair yesterday, she told me that she had been at a hair show in Long Beach when the news started to spread. It was just a few moments before a barber battle. Rob Ferrel, an incredible hair artist, changed his plans on the spot and whipped out this winning piece.

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A few days later, he would make something even better.

My trainer and I spent most of our lone session this week reminiscing about Kobe’s basketball legacy and discussing how we’ve been coping. He bleeds Lakers purple and gold. Kobe’s final game still sits on his DVR. We didn’t cry together, but I wouldn’t have been surprised or ashamed if we had.

I’ve read RIP KOBE on every city bus I’ve seen this week. I haven’t made a trip outside of the house where I didn’t see a jersey or cap or a face that didn’t express the anguish running through this town.

Shaquille O’neal is crying on my television. A co-worker is weeping in my office. A dream version of me screams out in anguish.

A helicopter just flew overhead. It’s seven days later, and it’s a beautiful morning in this city I adore. There’s no fog to obscure its path. It will reach its destination, and those aboard will keep going.

So will you. So will I. So will we.

To Los Angeles and basketball, we’re bruised but not broken.

We’re here.

Let’s go.