Dear Morehouse Brothers: Let’s Make It Our New Year’s Resolution To Keep Living

   The year 2025 is over, but it is the year 2023 and 2024 that I am not over. Guys in my Morehouse class were diagnosed with prostate cancer in the preceding years – it upset me. Then there was Buddy.  I didn’t know him well and he wasn’t in my class at Morehouse, but he was well respected, and him dropping stone cold dead in front of his family at a restaurant wasn’t cool. I went to high school and Morehouse with one of his line brothers. When Ron stood up at a conference we both attended and said, “Buddy wasn’t my line brother, he was my brother,” that really hit me. I have a friend like that, so I knew exactly how he felt.

  I pledged with Kevin – we called him “Grease.” When he didn’t show up for work and couldn’t be reached, they did a wellness check on him and found him dead at home. The funeral was a Morehouse “state funeral” of sorts. He deserved it, but that didn’t make the occasion any less sad.

  Another line brother died in the summer – my classmate. His wife came home and found Mike in the basement by the exercise machine. It was his heart; and it was the hearts of all of us that knew him, most of all his wife and his daughter in college and his son about to start.

  But the kicker was Morris – one of my first friends in college. Here he is texting me at 9 a.m. to tell me that he was praying for our classmate J.R., who was in critical condition in the ICU, and then here comes Darryl and Len and Kelvin calling me at 2 p.m. the same day telling me that Morris was found dead in the park where he collapsed riding his bike.

  I was at the grocery store at the self-checkout when I got the call. I. Just. Lost. It. I was on the grocery store floor on my knees and the staff was asking me if everything was all right. No - it wasn’t all right. Not at all. I’m a doctor. Morris was a doctor. But when I needed a doctor’s wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, I called Morris. He was that kind of doctor, and he was that kind of friend. None of these guys were over 61 years old. Buddy was in his late fifties.

  In October, I went to my 45^th year high school class reunion in Chicago. Somebody commented that the high school Class of 1980 had lost more people than the Class of 1975. Our class has a death rate among Black males that is 2.3 times higher than our White counterparts, and with my high school becoming more integrated over that five-year period, I’m betting that the reason they had fewer deaths was because they just didn’t have as many Black men in the class to die too doggone soon.

Something is going on with Black men of a certain age – gone too soon. As Rena, the wife of one of my deceased high school friends and classmates said, “Black man down.” The existential challenge for the Black man remains managing the inherent stress of being one in America.

  But I am resolved to live. Sometimes, I don’t feel like being bothered with the stress of life. The fight wearies you. But it is so anguishing to lose the people you love that you need to make the effort to stay here as long as you can, and as joyfully and gratefully as you can. Jesus died that we may have life and have it more abundantly. He deserves our best efforts at that. “Down, but not slain,” my Uncle Bill used to say. “I’ll rest a while and get back up again.”

  So – to my Morehouse brothers, and to the men and women of the Atlanta University Center – let’s resolve to live. Get your rest. Let it go, whatever the bad “it” is. Get moving – walking, biking, lifting weights. Don’t just eat anything, and don’t eat too much of anything either. See your doctor – check yourself and don’t wreck yourself with things that you know you shouldn’t do any more or with folk you shouldn’t bother with. Ask the Lord for help, because we all need His help. Let’s all resolve to live in 2026. We can die anytime, but let’s make it some other year besides this one. Please.