Maya Angelou had planned to celebrate her 40th birthday when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
She stopped eating and wouldn’t answer the phone.
Her friend James Baldwin came by and yelled until she opened the door. He told her to go take a bath and he would get some clothes out of her closet for her. He said: “You need to laugh, and you need to have somebody watch you laugh and laugh with you.”
She recovered — not completely, but she caught her sense of equilibrium — in the “sparkling company” of good friends. Sometimes that’s the only thing that will do.
One of the recurring topics of these pages is grief. Much has been written about it, but most of the advice has not been helpful to me. This is one of the exceptions.
• Source: Maya Angelou told this story many times. Here’s one version:
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