Grief does not disappear. It waits. It watches. It returns when you are still enough to feel it.
My mother died on Mother’s Day, May 8, 1994, at roughly 7:00 p.m.
It may have been slightly before. It may have been a little after. I honestly cannot remember.
What I do remember is walking to the car.
I remember the parking lot at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in Watts, California. I remember the weight in my chest, the silence in my body, and the sense that something essential had been removed from the world on a day meant to honor her.
The pain of losing my mother is something I have never healed from. Time did not resolve it. Life did not soften it. It simply learned how to hide.
Some thirty-two years later, I am sitting alone in the driver’s lounge of a Pilot truck stop in Missoula, Montana. My laundry is tumbling in the dryer. The road is quiet. The work is paused. My face is soaked with tears.
The grief arrived without invitation. Unprovoked. Unsolicited.
There was no memory I reached for, no anniversary I marked, no song that triggered the moment. And yet, it is impossible to separate the loss from the day itself. Mother’s Day never passed without weight.
Grief does not disappear. It waits. It watches. It returns when you are still enough to feel it.
Most of my early childhood was spent with my mother. My father worked third shift for the Dial Corporation, specifically on the Purex side. We had a large picture glass window in our home, and I would wait eagerly in front of it each morning, watching for his car to pull in. Many days, I had to leave for school before he arrived.
The point is simple.
My mother was my primary caregiver.
Together, my parents held what could only be described as a small real estate empire in South Central Los Angeles. The time I spent with my father was practical and physical. Plumbing repairs. Fixing things. Working with my hands.
It is almost ironic that I grew up to loathe most physical labor, or at least to prefer paying someone else to do it. That preference feels like a quiet rebellion against something I never fully understood at the time.
I do not remember when or how my mother became ill. I assume I was simply too young to hold onto those details.
What I do remember is caring for her.
Being present. Attending to her needs. Offering attention without instruction.
That instinct never left me.
It became a way of moving through the world, a readiness to give, to notice, to hold space. And yet, over time, that same instinct learned restraint. Caution. Silence.
There is a gap there. Not an absence of feeling, but a containment of it.
In quiet moments, especially when I am alone, there is a low, constant rumble of care and affection trapped inside me, pressing outward, waiting for permission. Not just to be given, but to be seen.
I cannot locate the misstep. I cannot name the insecurities. I cannot fully explain the distance between the man people experience as funny, charming, thoughtful, even inspiring, and the man who freezes when a camera is pointed at him.
Sometimes I wonder if the road is doing more harm than good.
I drive in silence for thousands of miles at a time. Mile markers blur together. States change. The scenery shifts, but the interior remains unchanged. There is too much time to think and not enough distraction to outrun myself.
I try to find solace by pressing record on my iPhone and filming whatever is in front of me. A meal. A dashboard. A rest stop.
I tell myself I will talk. I tell myself the words will come.
Instead, the idea evaporates the moment the camera turns on. The language disappears. I chew. I stare. I stop recording.
The silence returns heavier than before.
After my mother’s death, my relationship with the outside world changed. Not that it was ever fully developed to begin with.
I spent most of my childhood alone. No siblings, not until I was thirty-six. No cousins I really knew.
I had friends, but I rarely saw them outside of school. Home was quiet. Life was inward.
At some point, my existence began to feel optional.
That idea settled into my mind early and never fully left. I never had the strength to follow through, but I shed countless tears over the weight of carrying it.
In the apartment my father and I moved into, the closet doors in my bedroom were wooden. For years, I would sneak kitchen knives into my room and carve those thoughts into the wood. Later, I would scratch them out so my father would never know what had been written.
The anguish echoes. The tears flowed like the Nile. And in quieter ways, they still do.
Now, those thoughts surface only under specific conditions. Money. Instability. The threat of sudden loss, like being fired or having the ground give way without warning.
Yesterday, I spoke at length with a friend.
It reminded me of something I have always known but rarely trust. I have a lot to say. And, ironically, a compelling voice to say it in.
Writing has always been easier for me than speaking. On the page, I can slow the world down. I can choose my words. I can place meaning where I want it to land.
But there are things inside me that need to be spoken aloud.
Joy, for instance.
My writing feels heavy, even to me. And yet, in person, my persona is often surprisingly jovial. I laugh easily. I disarm rooms. I move through life with more lightness than my words might suggest.
Even now, my intention is not to burden the reader with sadness or pain. It is to lay out my internal history honestly, in the hope that someone else might recognize themselves and feel less alone, or changed in some small but meaningful way.
There is also a part of me that is a curmudgeon. Sharp. Dry. Unimpressed. That part is real, but it is also a character. One I manage carefully.
I keep it off the internet out of fear of being misread, of being flattened into a stereotype, of becoming the angry Black man instead of the full, complicated human being I know myself to be.
The first time First Brands Group laid me off and I was introduced to the DriveAway industry, I did not appreciate what I had been given. I did not even like it.
People told me to revive my YouTube channel. I refused.
Instead, I took another job with the same company, this time some 2,200 miles away, only to be fired again a year and a half later.
Now I am back on the road. Still sad. Now filming. But something feels wrong.
A friend told me recently that The Burger Crawl felt like me, and that my most recent content does not. I cannot say that I fully agree, but I cannot ignore the observation.
Being on camera is just as difficult now as it has always been.
I do not want to be famous. I want to be impactful.
I spend too much time alone. I cry too much. I hurt too much to keep forcing myself to make content that feels hollow, content that does not land, content that does not move anyone, including me.
I am not a caricature. I am not someone using food as a maladjusted coping mechanism. I am not performing excess for shock or attention.
I genuinely love what food represents in the world and in culture.
Food is memory. Food is place. Food is history. Food is connection.
What I want is simple, even if it is not easy.
I want to explore the world through food, through culture, through pain and joy alike. I want to tell those stories honestly, through my own lens, without pretending the hurt is not there and without letting it consume the entire frame.
My mother’s memory, her smile, her love, her attention, and her grace are what allow you to know the man who is still trying to become Cue the Critic.
Revised October 2026.