Corporate Counsel Women of Color Sisters Speak
Location: Intersection of Truth Freeway & Power Parkway
By Dr. Robin L. Smith
Calling all CCWC sisters to the floor of your own worthy life; to the fertile groundswell of self-love and self-ownership; where you unapologetically belong to yourself, regardless of how robust or how fragile you may feel.
As we close out 2022 with all its losses and gains, I was heartbroken, speechless, and shaken awake to learn from the founder, Laurie Robinson Haden, that death swept through the CCWC this year, taking ten vibrant sisters.
I shared with Laurie that I, too, am in the throes of my own grief journey after the passing of my dear and only brother, Damian, who transitioned suddenly and unexpectedly after a glorious trip to Paris.
As my family attempted to plan Damian’s service, my nephew, Damian’s son, approached me and softly asked: “Aunt Robin, will my father’s death make us closer as a family?”
I heard his pain, and alongside it, a deep need and longing to romanticize life in the face of unexpected tragedy. He, like many of us, was conditioned to believe that after loss a fairy godmother might appear, waving her twinkling magic wand to explain the meaning of such a loss and perhaps to illuminate a silver lining. I hate being fantasy’s executioner, but I knew that this was an important opportunity for truth.
“The purpose of death is to illuminate the truth,” I told him. Whatever was true before death is true now and stands front and center in the marvelous and sometimes blinding light to be addressed.”
There was silence, then, between us, full of emotion, feeling, appreciation, and awe. In the Bible, such a breath is called a Selah or holy pause.
Death, among many things, is an informant, who brings with him instructions for the living: live life fully while you can.
As 2022 winds to a close, I invite you, the CCWC family to take a Selah— a breath– to feel what you feel, to appreciate the world AS IT IS in all its trembling beauty and pain. When we truly appreciate this duality without running away from either beauty or from pain, we give ourselves the opportunity to make a change. Many years ago, when I found myself at rock bottom, I took inventory of my circumstances, my losses and my pain, my hopes, my dreams, and a prescription came to me: Wake Up! Show Up! Grow Up! Rise Up!
These words lifted me from total darkness to light, and they transformed my life. If they are helpful to you, I invite you to use them as tools in your own journey toward health and wholeness. Because when we Wake Up! Show Up! Grow Up! Rise Up! in this life, when Death does arrive, he will find us Alive, living our best and most worthy singular experience.
The ten CCWC sisters who lived their lives, who ran their race, are cheering you on in your quest to Rise Up! into truth, self-compassion, transformation, and liberation. Let their lives and their deaths be a mirror for you on your own journey toward healing and wholeness; Let them speak from eternity where they are free and let them challenge you to see the truth of your own circumstances and the possibility that freedom can exist in the here and now.
In solidarity and power!
Dr. Robin