SPFPP 359: 23 Years of Grief
23 Years of Grief
A man’s experience with abortion by Courtney Brame
I went to apologize for my inconsistency over the past month and a half to the SPFPP Podcast listeners and share what’s coming which should’ve taken all of 15 minutes, but I just kept on getting stuck. This kind of stuck came with a handful of obstacles like my first recording cutting off because I ran out of storage on my phone and then that was followed by me catching myself rambling, only to re-record, and then I realized what it really was, and that was fear.
The fear that kept me from moving forward with the previous recordings came from me suddenly shifting from talking about what’s relevant to herpes into my own personal experience with grief. This inherently isn’t a bad thing especially considering that I’ve talked about grief in the past. This year is different because of what the grief represents, which very much ties in to abortion.
When I was 12 years old at the end of October/early November before my 13th birthday November 10th, my grandmother on my dad’s side was in the hospital. She passed away at some point the week before my birthday which in 2001 was on a Saturday. This was the day they scheduled her funeral and I have remembered very distinct moments of that day that I just can’t forget. I’ve forgotten more than what I can remember, but the thing is that the body knows and remembers far better than the conscious mind does. What was repressed into my subconscious over the years has forced its way to the surface especially since I started Yoga Teacher Training and Therapy around the same time.
It was during a practice in my teacher training that I cried for the first time in a while. I always heard the women say there’s a lot of emotion in the hips and things may just need to release themselves, however, I didn’t understand what that was or what that meant because the last time I cried that I could recall was not even my 13th birthday at my grandma’s funeral, so why the hell is pigeon pose going to make me cry? Well . . . it was actually in “happy baby” that I felt that lil’ double inward gasp that comes usually before tears and I had a “what the fuck?” moment. Fortunately Yoga teacher training prepared me for emotions coming up and at this point I’ve had some language and tools to help me, but a memory reawakened. For reference this was in 2020 during the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
As I paid more attention to the activities in class, especially around reflecting on our emotions and self-study, as my birthday drew closer, I realized that I was really moody and easily frustrated. My uncle had passed away from COVID that year so death was on my mind and I had to attend his funeral which made me think about my late grandmother. I vividly remember when I looked in the casket, laughing, and thinking to myself “that ain’t my fucking grandma”, which I now know denial is the first stage of grief, and I just haven’t been able to get past that until what I thought was the year 2020, but I see now after recording today’s podcast episode that led to this writing, that was not the case at all.
The frustration I felt that followed wasn’t mine. My family speculated what happened to my grandmother who died way too young especially as one of the most healthy of her 13+ siblings. My mom told me when I asked just yesterday, that my grandma passed from COPD complications which makes sense cause she smoked a pack of cigarettes a day from what I remembered. Them Newport boxes were all over the place. But I don’t think I ever got to experience those emotions consciously that I “should” have. I say should with quotation marks because everyone grieves in their own way, and mine was SUPER unconscious and really was amplified and brought to the surface given this year’s US Presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, where the main topic talked about was abortion.
So my grandmother’s funeral was on my 13th birthday. Now here I am 36 years old, 23 years later, and I’m writing about it. Why now? Because my grandmother is the reason I wasn’t aborted.
My mother was pregnant at age 17 by my father who was also 17 at the time. I am grateful to them both for raising me. I know way too much about the time around my development in my mother than I think any person should. I know that my mother’s parents wanted her to get an abortion, and that my father’s mother was the only one who fought for me. For perspective, my mom’s father was always REALLY scary to me as a kid, so the fact that she was able to stand up to him against what he wanted about HIS daughter (my grandfather don’t play about the women in his life, even his now ex-wife, my granny who is my mom’s mom) says a lot about the conflict of my grandmother’s values and beliefs vs his.
The story is told and untold (because some people want to protect me from the truth) to me from a variety of angles but the one I put together with the bits and pieces from my great grandmother (my dad’s grandma), my mother, and my dad’s father is that Patricia Johnson fought for me to be here HARD. Knowing this story at first really had me side eye my mother lol, but I get it, she was 17 years old, still in high school, and pregnant with me. I don’t know what my grandmother saw in me, (which I need to note that my grandmother saw demons and was diagnosed with I believe schizophrenia) but she fought so hard for that version of me that is currently getting all this attention in the media from extremes on those for and against abortion. Part of my grief after learning parts of this has been trying to piece together the story. If we look at the Koshas in Yoga or the five layers of existence, grief manifests in the physical body as tension and physical pain, the energy body as disrupted breathing, the mental body with emotional turbulence (or avoidance unintentionality and overanalyzing), the intuitive body or inner wisdom, and then the spiritual body seeking to process the grief fully and heal. Much of my life was thinking I was just supposed to mentally move forward understanding she was here, now she isn’t. But then my body had something to say and the year 2020 forced its presence through me, and in 2024 I have experienced enough healing to know this grief and engage this stage of processing it.
I can only imagine how conflicted my mother was with this decision as all she had were these opposing values in front of her. I won’t tell her story here, but she has one. And this is supposed to be about my relationship with my grandmother so I can speak to the grief better. This woman who had no logical way of knowing who I would become, if I’d be born, what I would do, or anything at all, and was mentally ill had this delusional belief in me to be able to protect and convince my mom to go through with bringing me forth.
What sucks about this the most is that I don’t know if she knows, but she was right to bet on me the way she did. I can’t thank my grandmother. I can’t prove she was right that I would be something special. As arrogant as that may sound, I do know my worth and I know the impact I have on the people around me, but that doesn’t mean shit to me because no matter how many people thank me for my work, or how many lives I save through my podcast or something I say, I’ll never get to show my grandmother the fruits of her labor. I created this thing that is Something Positive for Positive People healing people’s suffering, I’m inspiring vulnerability, I’m having hard conversations, and she’s not here to see any of it and that hurts me more than anything else. The first woman to fight for me with the delusion of unconditional love was this woman and she isn’t here. She set the bar real high for me especially in how I’ve viewed my expectations on partners. I sought out that caliber of love in a high quality and quantity of partners only to learn again and again that nobody would be able to give me THAT love and it’s different than the love you can get from a relationship.
But my grief doesn’t know this. I don’t know this in my grief. I’ve unconsciously had a lot of relationships I shouldn’t have and treated people in ways they didn’t deserve, all in pursuit of this love. Arguably, even my presence in this career field is an attempt to further prove that I deserve to be here. The nice guy syndrome is real, the people pleasing, the fear of saying no, doing everything right, this all stems from that backstory I know about having not been aborted and who was responsible for that. So my relationship with women came with THAT expectation, and anyone not in that role was someone I needed to convince that I belong here because during development, nobody else wanted me here. Nobody else thought I deserved to be here.
I look to Yoga and what I’ve come to find as my Karma and Dharma or my action and purpose. Here I am in the field of sex education very adjacent to abortion and as a Man who hears all the time that we have no say so in this matter. I disagree one as someone who wasn’t aborted, and two as someone who contributes to pregnancy, and three, which is the biggest part, men are removing themselves from the conversation because of the messaging around abortion excluding us altogether except for as the bad guy. Women may not feel safe with the Men who contributed to pregnancy, leading to abortion, but that isn’t everyone’s story. Both sides politically shape the other and leave out the majority of reasonable people. It’s like people forgot the very people left out of the conversation around the problem are in fact a massive part of the problem, which inherently makes them part of the solution.
As someone well-known for talking about his herpes diagnosis on the internet, I’ve been seen as brave or vulnerable, but reality is that isn’t. Who’s going to talk shit on or cancel someone who does what they do because people in that situation want to kill themselves? You’re a dick if you talk shit about me for that. What’s really vulnerable for me is this because what I say can be misrepresented, dismissed, invalidated, and as not important, but I imagine there’s a lot more stories from men who have had a partner who got an abortion, or we can even go into the first born black man of a single mom and THAT relationship, like in my case I know about the juggling of my existence in the womb, and who knows what else.
Sharing my experience is most critical to that because not only was my experience with abortion pre-existing to my birth or ability to contribute to pregnancy, but I had a partner who had an abortion and I know that has affected me. But nobody wants to hear from a man about abortion which makes society think that this is exclusively a women’s issue and arguably that thinking has led to men not caring more and advocating for women’s rights. How men feel or don’t feel is often something that impacts women more than anyone else. How men feel regarding issues they’re not supposed to engage in dialogue about seems like a system by design that upholds this division of our collective power being able to engage.
Here we are 23 years into grieving for my dharma to express itself from something that precedes my birth. Patricia Johnson knew something nobody else at that decision-making table did. At 36 years old I’m finding my voice and initiating meaningful conversations that steer toward solutions to issues that all genuinely stem from men’s emotional ignorance which I believe is by design. Looking at my grief took years of accumulated experience and initially a few hours of Yoga teacher training and some therapy sessions all for four years later me to process that this thing that happened TO me was actually supposed to happen THROUGH me to encourage men to see the importance, power, and value of first becoming aware of their emotions, then being able to link those emotions to behaviors and see how their experiences have been shaped whether consciously or unconsciously.
I stopped feeling that feeling of stuckness when I began to talk about my grief, even amidst this self-pressure to silence myself and not speak to it. This morning in a Yoga Therapy client session after my recording, my client inquired on the fact that I looked lighter in my presence. I shared briefly what I shared in the podcast and she validated this experience by sharing a story about how her ex-husband’s inability to be vulnerable was the reason they divorced after 30 years of marriage. She spoke specifically about him having finally shared about having a partner who had an abortion when they were in high school, and how he held on to that for YEARS and when he shared, she didn’t know what to do with that.
I believe a lot of us are holding on to things we don’t know what to do with, and therefore we don’t think others will know what to do with it either so it feels safer for us to just not share. It feels safer to not be vulnerable especially in the “men ain’t shit” era. Especially when women are saying to leave their bodies alone which makes us feel like we have no say regarding abortion which is often caused by pregnancy, which is caused by sex, which is caused by semen, which is caused by men. (all of this holding true in most general cases)
I don’t know how to end this other than acknowledging like my man Brok says, “The nature of a thing is more important than the form of a thing” in God of War Ragnarok on PS5. But jokes aside, THIS is what vulnerability is for me. That herpes shit is cool, but that collectively won’t change if men can’t be vulnerable. That may look like getting cancelled, unfollowed, being misunderstood, hell even crying while speaking into a mic about your experience. But one thing for damn sure is that somebody gone feel some healing as a result of me putting out there my feelings and showing the power of this shit for someone else to be willing to dive into the power of their own shit. I appreciate your time, and again, I dedicate my work moving forward to Patricia Johnson, my late grandmother who would be so fucking proud of the person I became. And I’m going to work on not feeling a need to prove I belong here anymore and just be that lil’ spec of whatever the hell my grandma saw me to be fulfilling my dharma.
