KevOnStage’s ‘Grief Sucks’ Is A Dissertation On Black Men, Grief And The Radical Possibility Of Care [Op-Ed]

A dissertation is not simply a really long paper.

At its best, it is evidence that someone has stayed with a question long enough, studied it deeply enough, and wrestled with it honestly enough to offer the rest of us a new way of understanding it.

That is why doctoral study can be so difficult. You have to decide what deserves years of your attention and keep returning to it—digging, questioning, and learning long after the novelty is gone.

Watching KevOnStage perform Grief Sucks, I realized scholarship does not always happen inside a university.

Sometimes life is the scholarship.

Humor is the scholarship.

Being an intercessor between people and experiences they do not yet have language for is the scholarship.

And sometimes God creates spaces in our lives that we never would have chosen, then asks whether we are willing to study what happened there deeply enough to discover something about our purpose.

That is what I believe I witnessed with Grief Sucks.

KevOnStage’s research subject is himself.

His case study is the death of his older brother, Jason Fredericks.

His methodology is comedy.

And Grief Sucks feels like his dissertation for what I believe could become lifelong work around showing people—particularly Black men—how to thrive, build, create, love, and continue living through grief.

When I spoke with Kev after seeing the show, I told him that if he never did anything else, he should feel good about what he created here.

I meant it.

Because underneath the comedy is a thesis Black communities desperately need:

A Black man can experience devastating pain without making the people who love him collateral damage.

Walking out of the show with my friend Monroe, I found myself saying, “We don’t get to see Black men grieve in a way that doesn’t hurt the people around them.”

We know the other story.

I cheated because I was grieving.

I disappeared because I was grieving.

I became angry because I was grieving.

I hurt people because I was hurting.

Then everyone surrounding the grieving man is asked to absorb the consequences because he is going through something.

Grief Sucks offers another possibility.

Kev hurts.

Deeply.

And nobody has to bleed for us to believe him.

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