This February feels heavy in my bones. 

This is not the heaviness of despair.  Rather, this is the weight you feel when you pick up something you know you cannot drop, but still find it hard to carry. On the 14th, I turned 70. This month, I am also marking 39 years of marriage and 43 years of public service. Aging While Black, the movement that daily renews my sense of purpose, turned three on my birthday. All of that is layered on top of Black History Month in a nation where the past, present, and future realities of Black people are under full frontal attack. 

This is a month where time feels compressed. It is as if decades of living, loving, serving, and remembering seem to jockey for space in the shortest month on the calendar.

Turning 70 has ushered me into a different kind of reflection. I have spent most of my life in motion. Over the years there have been legislative sessions, church meetings, community gatherings, strategy tables, and organizing rooms. Now, at 70, it is as I am viewing it all through a different lens. My focus is drawn to the people I have tried to serve, the impact I have tried to make, and the communities that have shaped me as much as I have tried to shape them. Thirty-nine years of marriage is its own testimony. It is not a story of perfection, but of commitment. A story of two people deciding again and again to stay at the table. Forty-three years feels like a long time. Whether in elected office, public agencies, nonprofit leadership or the pulpit, it all represents a long arc in the same direction. 

When I think about Aging While Black turning three on my birthday, I see it not as a startup story, but as the latest chapter in a life that has hopefully been about how people live, bond, and persist together.

Yet even in this moment, weight still feels more honest than celebrate. Part of that weight is the shadow my father casts across every February. Valentine’s Day is not just my birthday, it was our birthday. For years, February 14 meant the quiet joy of knowing that the person who gave you life entered the world on the very same day. My father died at 55. I have now experienced  15 birthdays he never saw. I keep count. I carry it with me. Those years do not feel like something I earned, instead they feel like time I have been entrusted with. The older I get, the more I feel a responsibility to make good on that trust.

The weight of it all seemed even heavier during the two days I recently spent in Montgomery, Alabama. The Legacy Sites are not tourist attractions, they are sacred spaces. With each successive experience, I felt my spirit swell with memory, sorrow, anger, and a determined kind of hope. 

At the National Monument to Freedom, I stood in front of walls bearing the surnames of more than 122,000 formerly enslaved people documented in the 1870 census. These names allow their descendants to see themselves in this country’s story, even as  this country pretends not to see them. I moved slowly along the wall, not quite prepared for what I might find and yet compelled to look.

I am incapable of describing the moment you find your family’s name carved in that kind of stone. In that moment the abstract word ancestors morphs into something concrete. I saw the name Judson. This is the spelling most of my family still uses. It is the original version of the one I sign on documents and answer to every day. I even found  the surnames of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. My chest tightened. My breath shortened. I felt my eyes well up even as I was determined to feel another emotion. Suddenly, these were not symbols on a wall, these were people whose survival made my 70th birthday possible. Standing there, I struggled with the tension between feeling small and enormous at the same time.

All of this is happening in THE February where Black History Month does not feel like a ritual of remembrance, but ground zero of a war. This fight is not really about what gets printed in textbooks or spoken in classrooms. It is about whether the lives, losses, and contributions of Black people will be treated as optional footnotes or the central chapters in the American story they truly are. 

And as I wrestle with these prickly concerns in public, I am also experiencing a very private set of responsibilities. I am a caregiver for my 92-year-old mother, who fights to keep her wisdom sharp even as her body requires more attention. I am walking with my daughter through palliative care. I often struggle trying to be strong enough to be her advocate and soft enough to simply be her father. 

At the end of December, I stepped away from my role leading MetroMorphosis, the social enterprise I founded and poured more than a decade into. I have no doubt it was the right decision at the right time, but that does not make it easy. 

The more I sit with it, the clearer it becomes that this weight is deeply personal, but it is not mine alone. Black elders across this country are navigating realities that rarely show up on any chart, grief that never quite gets processed, financial calculus that often doesn’t add up, and health challenges that come earlier and harder than they should. In the midst of all of this they navigate caregiving that flows in multiple directions, and the sheer exhaustion of seeing your humanity debated by people who have never had to defend their own. The complexity of my February is but a microcosm of a broader reality. An untold number of us are carrying personal stories that are inseparable from a collective weight.

All of it makes Aging While Black matter to me more than ever. It affirms my belief that aging is not an individual journey measured in candles on a cake. Aging must be seen as a collective and intergenerational experience. It is the story of how people move through time together. 

In our current work, we describe aging while Black as a multigenerational and collective experience shaped by shared movement through time, memory, and responsibility. My father’s early death and the 15 birthdays I have lived beyond his. The names on that wall in Montgomery, reaching into the present. My caregiving for my mother and my daughter. The decades of public service and movement work that have shaped my days. All of these moments and the people in them are connected by a single thread. This experience is in part what we at Aging While Black call our collective longevity. All of it is grounded in the shared movement of memory, responsibility, and possibility across generations.

So this February, I am learning to regard the weight I feel not only as a personal burden, but as a kind of calling. I cannot change my father’s lifespan, but I can honor the years I have been given by using them well. I cannot erase the sorrow on those walls in Montgomery, but I can refuse to let those names be reduced to tragedy when they are also testimonies. I cannot single-handedly ease the strain on every Black elder juggling health concerns, caregiving, and financial pressure, but I can commit the rest of my days to building a movement that insists they do not have to carry all of that alone. My invitation to you, as you read this, is simple, take stock of the weight you are carrying this month. Name it. Refuse to carry it in silence. And consider joining us in the work of Aging While Black, as we practice collective longevity, honor our elders, and build communities where our history and our humanity are not up for debate.