This week’s edition of Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard. It is a reflection and introduction to this year’s theme of Slow Care.
At 3:56pm on September 27, 2024, my mother took her last breath. In the 5 hours that preceded that breath, I brushed and braided her hair, cleansed her face and body, and made sure that she was ready to cross that threshold between life and death. I sat with my aunt and recounted the memories that defined who she was and how they shaped us – her daughter and sister. These actions were instinctual, an embodied memory that guided me through this end-of-life care. It was a ritual of bearing witness to her life and death.
I experienced what Christina Sharpe (2016) describes as the power of the wake, the “power of and in sitting with someone as they die, the important work of sitting (together) in the pain and sorrow of death as a way of marking, remembering, and celebrating a life” (p. 11). Sharpe’s concept of wake work describes the ongoing practices of care, attention, and resistance required to live in the aftermath of historical and personal loss, to navigate “the wake” of slavery, death, and systemic violence while insisting on Black life and futurity. My vigil at my mother’s bedside was an act of wake work, holding space not just for her passing but for the reclamation of her story and my own as I began this phase of life without her physical presence.
I think about this experience when I reflect on my praxis of slow care, this refusal to rush through grief. It’s not simply about slowness, but the deliberate practice of watchful attention that encompasses both individual and collective care. Through the lens of grief and loss, slow care is about recovery, repair, and reclamation of self.
I recall Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” and the idea of looking both high and low for the simple pleasures our Black foremothers enjoyed amongst historical violence. Slow care, in this sense, is about finding the hope and joy in the smallest tasks and endeavors even when those emotions feel unattainable.
I recall Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” and consider Black feminist pleasure politics and the idea that the erotic is firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings. Slow care, then, means leaning into that unexplored way of knowing and embracing our capacity for joy in every aspect of our lives. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” writes Lorde in a journal entry from her essay collection A Burst of Light. “It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” (1988, p. 131). This is especially true in our current political climate.
In the midst of political violence, mass shootings, genocides, immigration and deportation battles, natural disasters, and all the grim details in our never-ending news cycle, slow care takes on a bigger role. It’s about taking the time to reflect, to pay attention to the world around us, to those unexpressed and unrecognized feelings, and to how we navigate the wake in our advocacy for life and futurity.
The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) defines slow care as “a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites that together foster long term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies” (About C21’s 2025-26 Theme).
In C21’s podcast series, 6.5 Minutes With…C21, I interviewed guests who reflected on their practices of self and collective care. Desiree McCray frames slow care as a refusal to participate in cycles of exhaustion and overwork. She argues that rest itself can be an act of resistance that disrupts the systems that profit from our constant labor and distraction. Charmaine Lang reminds us that care requires vulnerability and a willingness to seek support. She calls for us to pause, to share in the practice of communal healing.
This is my praxis of slow care: an embodied, relational, and political practice of bearing witness, refusing urgency, and reclaiming joy. It is the deliberate attention to memory, grief, and community that resists erasure and values the cyclical knowledge of our past, present, and future. My practice of slow care is both a survival strategy and a vision, a way to honor the dead, care for the living, and imagine what it means to live well in a world that constantly asks us to rush past ourselves.
Grief is a process. You can’t rush it. You can’t put a timer on it, no matter how hard our society urges us to move on from the pain, sorrow, guilt, anger, tragedy, despair, and devastation of individual and collective loss. Sometimes, you need to sit with it. Reflect on it. Appreciate the quiet moments when our minds force us to remember, to feel, and to bear witness in the wake of slow care.
References
- Lorde, A. (2020). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (pp. 41-48). Penguin Classics.
- Lorde, A. (1988). A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer. In A Burst of Light (pp. 49-134). Firebrand Books.
- Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.
- Walker, A. (1994). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. In Within the Circle: An anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (pp. 401-409). Duke University Press.
Recommendations for Further Reading
Finch, A.K. (2022). Introduction: Black Feminism and the Practice of Care. Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 11(1), 1-41. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pal.2022.0000.
Swanson R. T., & Carreon, E. D. (2024). Uncovering the Transformative Labor in Black Women’s Community Work. Affila: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work 39(3), 534-553. https://doi.org/10.1177/088610992312239