My friend, Mia; what Black women mean to one another

[CONTENT NOTICE: Mention of suicide]

I met Mia Fuqua for the first time on two separate occasions.  On the second of these, she caught my eye as we stood in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning, a forty-two-story Gothic skyscraper straight out of Gotham City, and the main academic building at the University of Pittsburgh. Among the throng of workers and students milling about the elevator bank, Mia stood out.  She was dressed beautifully, stood straight and tall, and radiated confidence. So as I sometimes do when spotting a fellow Black woman in a predominantly white space, I walked up to Mia, told her my name, and asked her about herself. Almost from that moment in 2011, we were friends.

At that time, Mia was a staff member in the School of Social Work, and I was a graduate student in Pitt’s Department of Philosophy. Once a week or so, we would lunch at spots around our campus in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. We were of similar age and we’d talk about our careers, our dreams, our fears, our plans, our partners. Mia was funny, beautiful, kind, and strong. She was the kind of Black woman who made you think, “It is really a great, great thing to get to be a Black woman. A blessing.”

We went to see Rocky Horror together at the Hollywood Theatre in Dormont, to gorge ourselves on the buffet at India Garden, to page through the beer list thick as a bible at the Sharp Edge. I learned that she had a beautiful singing voice and had majored in Opera in college. I learned that her family had lived in Pittsburgh for generations. I learned that she was a breathtakingly skilled and graceful salsa dancer, sought after as a partner in salsa clubs across the country. I learned that she’d taught herself Hindi and traveled to India. And one day, I learned that Mia was completely entranced by Bollywood films, that she had a video rental membership at local Indian grocery store, Kohli’s, and that one of her favorite films of all time was the iconic coming-of-age romance, “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.” Just like a woman I’d known and lost touch with nine years before, named “Mia.”

Stunned, I asked Mia whether she had ever been a member of a Christian youth group. She answered that she had, and my mind flashed back to the early fall of 2002, when I was riding the 61B back home from the Cathedral of Learning, and a young Black woman my age introduced herself to me and struck up a conversation. She’d told me about her Christian youth group and invited me to attend one of their meetings. I was not yet an atheist. I was a twenty-one-year-old who’d just moved to a strange, new city, and was intrigued by the prospect of meeting more upbeat, friendly, young people of color like this woman who had just approached me on the bus.

In that fall of 2002, Mia invited me to potlucks at her home, to praise services with her youth group, and to come over and watch her favorite movie: “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.” This was all just over the span of two months or so; as I realized the youth group held little interest for me, I drifted away and we lost touch.

That all came rushing back to me again in 2011. Funnily enough, Mia never recalled anything about that first time we’d known one another; she only ever remembered the second. This was fitting, in a way, because it was this second time around that our friendship “stuck.” We had both evolved over the intervening years in ways that made us more compatible as friends and capable of a deeper understanding of one another.

This time, even when I moved across the state in the summer of 2012, we stayed in touch, catching up over texts and phone conversations. When I returned to Pittsburgh, as I did a few times a year, I’d call her up and we’d meet for lunch or drinks. I went back for her wedding, where she was inimitably “Mia,” blowing kisses into the audience, hamming it up as she waved her hand like a beauty queen, blessing her admirers as she sashayed down the aisle to marry a man she deeply loved. I felt so incredibly fortunate to have her friendship in my life, and to be a friend to her. She was brave, unbowed, determined, whip-smart, and deeply kind. She was in every way an inspiration, and I thought, if Mia Fuqua can live her Black womanhood so fearlessly, then so can I. I wanted for us always to be friends, cheering each other on.

The last time I saw Mia alive was in the summer of 2013. I called to let her know I’d be visiting the city, and we got together to catch up over burgers on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Even years later, I vividly recall my brows knitting together with concern as she described how she’d come upon stumbling blocks, personal and professional challenges in key areas of her life. I shared advice and offered commiseration—I could identify closely with so much of the pain she shouldered. She was melancholy, but she was holding it together, and forging ahead, like she always did. Like Black women always do.

On January 21, 2014, I received the news that Mia had died. It seemed impossible. Later, I learned that Mia had died by suicide. That made even less sense. Mia was strong, brave, and brilliant. She was a blazing bright light, an inspiration. If Mia couldn’t make it, if she couldn’t win her battle, what chance did I have? What chance did any Black woman have?

For four years, I have both tried and tried not to understand what it means to me that Mia is gone. Maybe part of me will always be afraid of that question: what does it mean when a person who inspired you to fight for your place in this world, decides it’s finally time to leave it, and you?

On the day of Mia’s memorial service, the funeral home was full of young, brilliant, ambitious Black women gathered from across the country, asking themselves and one another that very question, often out loud. I found respite from my grief in the community Mia had built up around her. I am deeply fortunate to still be friends with several of the women I met on that day, which feels like a last gift from Mia.

It is now about four years since Mia passed, sixteen years since the first time we met, and seven years since the second time, the time when I knew we were destined to be friends for life. Every day, I still struggle to understand what a world without Mia is. I think of my own challenges and how they slowly grind away at me. I itch, feeling the incessant wear and tear of racial trauma as dead Black bodies pile up and it occurs to me that in a quiet way, in a hidden way, Mia’s passing was one of those casualties.

Mia Fuqua was my friend, and I struggle still to understand what it means that she is gone.