Grief Is Like Deebo: It’ll Snatch Your Chain on a Regular-Ass "Friday"
A regular-ass Friday is exactly the kind of day grief likes. The sun is out (or not, like today), the block is lively, a neighbor is washing their car, someone is somewhere minding everybody else's business, and some folks are safely tucked inside their homes, not doing much of anything and not bothering anybody. Everyone is in their respective places doing what they do, and then DEEBO rolls up, and the whole atmosphere changes. People feel afraid, hide their valuables, and most often try to avoid him because they recognize what being close to him costs them.
That's what makes him such an accurate personification of grief. Deebo doesn't need or wait for an invitation, an appointment, or a day when people feel they have the emotional bandwidth to deal with him. He doesn't care what you have going on, honestly. He crashes through when he feels like it. Sometimes there's a warning, sometimes you sense he's nearby, and sometimes you've spent months or years knowing an encounter with him is probably inevitable. None of that changes the feeling of looking up suddenly and realizing he's here now, in front of you, reaching for something you thought you could hold onto.
Grief has the same kind of funky, entitled audacity. It'll interrupt an ordinary Friday and leave the date permanently marked inside your body or your psyche. For me, a phone call made my stomach drop. I didn't answer, but then I received a text from my big brother: "Mom has passed." That's a moment in time I can't ever forget. I sat frozen for what felt like hours.
But grief doesn't only show up through death. It can come through divorce, estrangement, illness, a friendship that quietly rots, a future that won't happen, a version of home that no longer exists, or the slow realization that someone you loved could never give you what you kept hoping love would eventually pull out of them. The losses are different. The nerve of grief is remarkably bold and consistent.
And grief doesn't only take; it bullies us into emotional territory we didn't choose. Sadness can sit on our chests; anger can make us pace; fear can have us checking the locks for the umpteenth time because we feel like we've lost our footing. Then, grief complicates things and reaches for joy, too, because once we've been blindsided by loss, even feeling good can start to seem a little reckless.
The block knows him before he arrives
Deebo's power isn't limited to the moment he takes something. His reputation reaches the block before the creaks of his bicycle do. People lower their voices, look around in apprehension, and tuck away the valuables that might catch his attention. He's basically already changed their behavior without laying a hand on anybody, YET. They know what he's capable of.
Grief can do the same thing to a nervous system. After a significant loss, we don't only mourn what happened; we start bracing for what else might happen. A late-night call feels foreboding, a routine medical appointment carries more meaning, and we may even hesitate before getting attached to a person, a plan, or a good season because now we know how quickly life can change the terms. Sometimes we protect our joy before it has fully developed or returned, afraid grief will see it shining around our neck and come snatch that too!
This is one reason no one can fully prepare you for grief. We can make arrangements, have hard conversations, study a diagnosis, and use words like anticipatory as though advance notice might soften the finality. It can help us understand what's coming, BUT it can't duplicate the exact silence that follows when someone is no longer reachable because they no longer exist-at least on this plane.
I had already grieved parts of my relationship with my mother before she died. I grieved the emotional care I needed and didn't receive, the distance I eventually needed, and the version of our relationship I once hoped we might find. I knew the relationship was complicated, and I also knew death was real. People would say, "You only get one mom, and what will you do if she passed away?" I always thought that was an ignorant thing to say to someone whose relationship with her mother they hadn't lived inside. Maybe they couldn't imagine it because their mothers had nurtured or loved them in the ways we'd expect mothers to. Mine hadn't. But then my mom died, and grief reached past everything I thought I had already accepted.
Even a difficult relationship has a future until it doesn't. There could still be a call, a conversation, a change of heart, or simply the possibility of an ordinary exchange. Now, if I want to hear my mother's voice, I have to listen to a voicemail she left when neither of us knew it would become something I might need to keep. Knowing grief may be coming isn't the same as knowing what it'll take once it arrives.
What he takes is never only the chain
Red gives us the clearest picture of grief's immediate aftermath. Deebo takes his chain AND his bicycle, but the scene is bigger than missing property because Red is left exposed in front of people who saw what happened and couldn't stop it. There's shock, humiliation, anger, and the sick awareness that the person who harmed him is still moving freely through the same neighborhood. The loss is his, but the atmosphere belongs to everyone nearby.
That's how grief expands. It may begin with one death or one ending, then it starts taking things that don't appear on an official list of losses. Sleep gets taken, concentration, appetite, patience, sexual desire, a sense of safety, and even the ability to enjoy a song without getting ambushed by a memory halfway through the second verse. Sometimes grief takes our confidence in our own minds because we can't remember what we walked into the room to do, yet we can recall the color of a casket with impossible clarity.
I was physically present at my mom's viewing and funeral, but there are parts of that day I'm only now beginning to feel. I remember riding behind the white limousine on the way to the service; I remember sitting on the front pew facing her white casket, and I remember seeing that same casket lowered into the ground. The images were available before the feelings actually were. My body seems to have kept them somewhere until I had enough room to know what I had witnessed. I still don't always know what to do with the feelings when they come up.
This type of delayed grief can make people question themselves. Why am I crying now? Why was I so composed then? Why am I angry when I thought I had accepted it? But composure isn't always peace, and delayed feelings aren't always failing at grief. Sometimes the body handles the funeral first and sends the invoice later. It gets us through the clothes, the flowers, the signatures, the hugs, and the people asking questions we barely have enough breath to answer. Then an ordinary Friday comes along, and Deebo is back demanding the peace you thought you preserved.
Everybody finds a way to survive his presence
When I think of the film Friday, the other people on the block seem like versions of ourselves as we try to cope. Each of them moves differently when an intimidating grief is nearby.
Smokey talks, jokes, bargains, improvises, and keeps trying to create one more minute between himself and whatever he doesn't want to face. Humor can work that way in grief. It gives your chest a little room to expand without collapsing completely. It lets someone tell a funny story at the repast and remember that the person who died wasn't only the final weeks, the hospital room, or the casket. Sometimes laughter is avoidance. Sometimes it's oxygen. Usually, we know the difference by what happens after the laughter stops.
Craig initially tries to stay out of the way. He watches, he calculates, he knows Deebo is dangerous, and he understands that challenging him can make you a target. Grief can make us cautious like that. We keep moving, handle what's necessary, and avoid the corner where the difficult feeling waits. That's not always denial in a shallow sense; sometimes it's the mind protecting itself because taking it all in at once would be too much.
Craig's mama, Mrs. Jones, represents another kind of survival: someone still has to keep the house going, right? Food must be made, we still have to work, bills still need to be paid, and people need to be checked on. Practical things can't wait for our hearts to catch up. Many Black families know this rhythm intimately. We can choose the obituary photograph, look at the flowers, receive a hundred hugs, fix someone a plate, and still have no idea what happened inside us that day. Competence can carry grief through a room so smoothly that even we mistake functioning for being 'fine.'
Then there's Debbie, whose presence matters because grief needs witnesses who don't make the pain prove itself. The person who stays nearby, notices what happened, and refuses to act like nothing happened can become part of how we find our footing again. Unexpected support can arrive, as it did for me (Thanks, Monica, Aleshia, and Marie!), because sometimes people can actually sit in the room with you without rushing you toward gratitude, forgiveness, closure, or a testimony about why everything "happened for a reason."
Mr. Jones brings perspective, but even his wisdom doesn't keep us from having to live through the confrontation. That matters. Good advice can't help us think grief away; faith can't make absence stop being painful; clinical knowledge can't excuse me, a therapist, from having a human nervous system. I can understand attachment, trauma, family systems, and bereavement and still be knocked sideways by a voicemail, a photograph, or the realization that there'll never be another call. Wisdom may help me decide what to do with the pain, but it doesn't make me too advanced to feel the loss.
At the same time, the rest of the world keeps moving. Big Worm still expects his money, people are still flirting, arguing, borrowing, avoiding, performing, getting on one another's nerves, and tending to whatever crisis was already in motion. This is one of grief's loneliest truths: the person we lost can be gone from the whole world as we knew it, while the rest of the world remains open for business. The mail comes, rent and the light bill are due, someone sends a ridiculous text, people ask how we're doing, and depending on who it is, we don't always know how to answer outside of "Um, I'm okay." Life doesn't become less ordinary just because ours has split into a before and after.
We experience multiple emotions in one day. We may feel stripped like Red, talk around the fear like Smokey, keep our heads down like Craig, and still get up to handle what Mrs. Jones knows must be done. These aren't orderly phases. They're ways we try to make it through the day while grief circles us like Deebo.
After a while, we start hiding the good stuff
The longer Deebo can move without being challenged, the more the neighborhood begins organizing itself around his weight and power. People don't merely respond to what he's done; they adjust their lives around what he might do next. That's the deeper cost of intimidation, and one of the quieter costs of grief.
We avoid the restaurant, skip the song, leave the photographs in the phone (or delete them), and let a birthday pass without making plans because celebration now has an empty chair built into it. We stop telling certain stories because we don't want the room to feel uncomfortable, and we may even become suspicious of happiness. The first real laugh after a death can feel like a betrayal until we remember that love didn't ask us to be miserable as proof that the relationship mattered.
This is where grief becomes larger than mourning. It starts making decisions about how much of our lives we're willing to risk. If we love again, something else could be taken; if we hope again, something else could fall apart; and if we wear the chain, Deebo might see it and take it! So, we hide what's precious and call it protection because we're trying to protect ourselves from something we can honestly never prepare for.
Is protection necessary in some facets of our lives? Absolutely. Grief changes our capacity, though. Still, there are rooms we shouldn't enter yet and conversations we don't owe anyone. Trust me, you can feel the difference between giving a wound time and surrendering it to someone who can't empathize with your humanity or your history. You're already dealing with enough; we don't need to add more bullshit to the equation.
Deebo gets knocked out, but the block remembers
By the end of Friday, Craig finally turns toward Deebo. The confrontation comes after too much intimidation has touched too many people and "silence as safety" has stopped working. Craig didn't become fearless overnight, but he did become unwilling to keep arranging himself and everyone else around Deebo's threat.
When Deebo is knocked TF out, the neighborhood can breathe for a minute, but that doesn't erase what happened. Red getting his bicycle and chain back doesn't erase the punch, the humiliation, or the fact that everybody learned what Deebo was capable of. Reclamation isn't the same thing as restoration; it's the moment the taking stops being the only truth in the scene.
That's the ending grief needs. It's not a promise that we'll defeat it so thoroughly that it never returns. Grief does return. It comes through music, anniversaries, dreams, family news, recipes, random errands, and the reflex to call someone before remembering we can't. Sometimes it stays ten minutes. Sometimes it takes the rest of the day. The point isn't to become tougher than grief or pretend we no longer miss what was taken.
The shift happens when we stop letting grief take everything else just because we're afraid of what it might take next. We can still let someone witness us, tell the truth about what the relationship was, including the love and the harm, listen to the voicemail when we want the voice, and turn it off when we've had enough. We can make room for anger without building a house inside it, and we can allow joy to come back without asking it to apologize for arriving before grief has completely left.
There will still be regular-ass Fridays when a memory turns the corner, the whole block inside us goes quiet, and sometimes we cry. But we know the neighborhood better now. We know which doors are safe, who can sit with us, what belongs to memory, and how we can still show up for the life we're living.
Grief can come through; it just can't run the whole neighborhood forever.
Of course MHM is listening to music while we process. We are not about to sit over here unpacking grief in complete silence. Nah.
Today’s song just happens to fit the mood of Grief Is Like DEEBO in that very specific, real-shit kind of way.
Press play and let it ride with the essay.
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