Put on Your Crown (13 page)

When my mother was an art teacher at Irvington High School, she devoted herself to those kids. The more troubled the students,
the more love she gave them. Over the years, she could see what was happening to the middle-class community where the school
was based. Drugs were a major problem. More students were dealing and using, and so were their parents. More kids were coming
out of broken homes and bringing that anger into the classroom. Gang violence would erupt in the schoolyard on a regular basis.
Knifings and shootings were commonplace.

Many times, I begged my mother to quit because I could see it was taking a physical toll. She didn’t need the work. I could
afford to retire her. But instead she took on more classes and started a weekly after-school program to help some of the kids
who were having personal problems turn their lives around. Ms. O cared for those kids so much, she routinely put herself in
harm’s way without any consideration for her own safety. One time, a seventeen-year-old girl twice her size was about to beat
in the head of another girl for stealing her boyfriend. This young lady was crazed, but my mother was determined to stop her
from getting herself expelled from school, so she grabbed on to her legs and held on for dear life. The girl dragged her for
a few yards down the hall, but my mother slowed her down just enough to allow the other girl to escape. The next morning,
the young lady was plenty contrite about what she did to my mother.

“Oh, Ms. O, I’m so sorry I dragged you like that!” she said. “Are you okay?”

Another time, my mother walked into a classroom in the middle of a lover’s spat: A boy the size of a linebacker was giving
his girlfriend a beat-down. He had a chair raised and was ready to smash it over his girlfriend’s head, but my mother placed
herself between them. She stopped the fight. When I heard about what happened, I was horrified.

“Ma!” I said. “Weren’t you worried something was gonna happen to you?”

“Well, Dana,” she said, “I’m still here.”

This quiet, gentle lady moves through her world unafraid because of her abiding love for her students. She’s more concerned
about the harm they might do to themselves than to her. “They’re just babies,” my mother says. “This is what God put me here
to do. With the right amount of attention and love, they still have a chance in life. They can change.”

My mother’s love, and her unwavering faith in God, trumps fear every time.

You don’t ever get over something like this.

You get through it.

—E
LAINE
O
WENS

Y
our brother had an accident on his motorcycle.”

I heard the words, but my brain couldn’t process them. Until that moment, it was just another ordinary day, like any other
on an early spring afternoon in New Jersey. The sun was shining, the crocuses were blooming, and the air had that new-life
smell to it. After a grueling schedule of touring in Europe for my second album, I finally had some time to chill out with
my friends and family, and for the past several days I’d been doing just that. I was thrilled to be home, hanging out with
my homies, seeing my mom, catching up with my brother, and riding around with our Redliner bike crew. I was enjoying all the
regular stuff I always did before my
music career blew up. In fact, I’d just finished helping a friend move his couch to a
new apartment in Jersey City. After hauling that thing up three flights of stairs, a bunch of us had just collapsed on the
floor and cracked open a beer when I got the 911 page from my brother’s boy Ramsey.

“Is it… is it bad?” I asked him, already guessing the answer from the tone in his voice.

“I think so,” he said, almost in a whisper.

My heart sank, and I felt the blood rush from my head. I was dizzy and confused. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I just
dropped the phone to my side and tried to let the reality of the situation sink in. But the more it did, the more unreal it
felt.

The rest of the story unfolded like some sickening nightmare. I don’t even know how it happened, but the next thing I remember
was Shakim bundling me into his car. We flew down the highway to University Hospital in Newark, where they’d taken my brother.
Shakim was driving fast, but it felt like we were in slow motion. When we approached a red light, I screamed at him to gun
it. Stopping was out of the question. I wanted nothing more than to get to that hospital. I
had
to see my brother.

As we were driving along, the blue skies turned gray, then black, and it started to pour. This storm just came out of nowhere.
That’s when I knew how bad it was. I could feel it. Right before something horrible like that happens, you get this knowledge,
this little voice inside you letting you know that whatever it is, something’s about to take place and you’d better brace
yourself. It could be that hunch you get the moment before your car gets into an accident or a nagging fear when you’re out
too late on a deserted street in the wrong kind of neighborhood. It’s like God is trying to give you a heads-up. Whether or
not you’re ready to hear it, He’s just letting you know. He’s preparing you for what is about to go down.

I wasn’t prepared, but I already knew. Winki and I had this connection—a bond. We were both Pisces—two fish swimming up the
stream together. He was two years older than me, and he was my hero. We always knew what the other was thinking. It was like
we were twins. It was the type of spiritual kinship that only the tightest of siblings can share. But something told me our
tie had been severed.

As we drove into the darkness with the rain whipping into the windshield, we could barely see the road
in front of us, but
I didn’t care.
“Faster, Shakim! Go! Go!”
As we pulled up to the emergency entrance, I recognized the motorcycle in the back of a tow truck—the Kawasaki Ninja ZX7
we’d bought him for his birthday. It was mangled and smashed and looked as if it would have been impossible to escape serious
injury unless he’d somehow managed to jump off it before it crashed. I started pleading and bargaining with God: “Please,
Lord. Please make it all right! I’ll do anything. If nothing else, just this once!”

The car was still moving when I opened the door and ran out. As soon as I got inside, I saw my brother’s crew.

“Where is he? Where’s my brother? Is he okay?”

They didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. I could see it in their faces.

My mom was there in the waiting room, and her eyes were wet from tears. I collapsed into her arms, crying, hoping, and praying.
She was eerily calm. She told me in a soft, steady cadence exactly what happened.

“Dana, Winki’s been hit and his bike went under the car. Now all we can do is wait.”

So we waited. And waited some more. The anticipation was unbearable, but we didn’t really want that pain to end, because there
was still hope. Then the doctor came into the room. She was still in her
scrubs, and she looked haggard and strained. She
pulled off her surgical gloves, lowered her mask, and peered down at my mother and me as we sat, clinging together and trembling
on the hard waiting room chairs. Then she spoke.

“I’m sorry. He’s gone.”

There was a second of stunned silence. Then it came out.

“No, he is
not
!” I yelled. “
No!
You ain’t telling me this crap! You have to do something! Get back in there and help my brother! Get back in there!”

I was out of my mind. The tears were flowing so fast, I couldn’t see. I was screaming and yelling, but the doctors kept their
cool. I guess they’ve seen this type of thing before. They told us they took extraordinary measures to save my brother. They
cracked open his chest and used twice as much blood as they normally would on a patient in his condition, because he was a
cop.

We were crying and shaking and trying to make it make sense. But that’s the thing with death. It’s non-negotiable. Nothing
and nobody can do anything to change it. And even though you know it, you don’t
accept it. But my brother was gone, and he
wasn’t coming back.

That was without a doubt the worst moment of my life. It was life-stopping in every sense. I literally stopped living. It
was like when an electric circuit gets a surge of power and it just can’t deal, so it shuts down. Right then and there, a
part of me died along with my brother. The only thing is, after all these years, I still feel the pain. Even now, eighteen
years later, I can’t talk or write about Winki’s passing without tearing up. A line in “Over the Mountain,” a song I wrote
on my last album,
Persona
, sums it up best: “Wish I could share it all with Wink, and I can still see his face every time I blink.”

That kind of loss is something you never get over. It leaves a void that stays with you for the rest of your life. You cope
and you deal and you learn to move on. But for me, after that night, my life wasn’t the same. And I know deep down in my heart
it never will be.

I know I’m not alone in this. Many of you have suffered this same kind of pain. Everyone goes through loss in life. No one
is exempt from it. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or famous or beautiful or not. Life will come down hard on you, and you’ve
got to get back up one way or another. You hit a fork in the road and you can choose either to deal or to self-destruct. For
me, that turning point was my brother’s death. You get
through it, but not past it. Because you don’t stop loving that person.
But you have to keep going. The key is to go in the right direction.

It took me a long minute to decide. Losing someone so young, with his whole future ahead of him, is unfathomable. My heart
breaks for the thousands of family members who’ve lost sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, wives, and husbands
in Iraq and Afghanistan. How do you ever make sense of a loss like that? I understand exactly what Janet Jackson is going
through now. She lost her big brother, too. A few months after his death, she was on an interview with
20/20
, and she said it all: “I guess you have to accept what is. But it’s just so…
hard
.”

The suddenness of a tragedy like this is cruel. You don’t even get to say good-bye. Someone who is a huge part of your life
is ripped away from you, with no warning. You also know it won’t be the last time you have to go through losing someone. The
longer we’re here on this earth, the more people we love get taken away from us, and there ain’t a damn thing we can do about
it. The only thing we can control is whether we start living again, or not. For months, and months, and months, I chose not.

I was numb. Angry. Guilty. I had every kind of negative emotion. I blamed God. I blamed myself. That bike I gave Winki for
his birthday, the one that gave him so much joy to ride, took his life. I’d lost my rock. My protector. My anchor. The one
who made me laugh and believed I could do anything. It was a grief that goes so deep, you can’t find the bottom. It’s something
you just don’t understand until you’ve been through it. You swing between disbelief, denial, and uncontrollable sadness. I’d
wake up crying and fill my day playing basketball until I was ready to drop, then drink until I fell asleep. I’d wake up the
next morning in tears, because nothing I could do would block out the reality that was waiting for me. I stopped working.
I dumped my boyfriend. I wanted to love him. I even wanted to get married. But the emotions kept shutting off. There was no
point.

A few years before Winki died, when I was just starting to gain some traction on my music career and good things were coming
our way, I wondered if there’d be some ultimate, cosmic price to pay for the success I craved. I don’t know if superstitious
is the word, but too much of the good life made me nervous. Maybe it dates back to my childhood, when I thought we had the
perfect family and my
parents’ decision to separate seemed to come out of nowhere. Ever since then, I didn’t quite trust happiness.
Deep down, in the recesses of my mind, I was afraid fame and fortune’s price would be the loss of someone dear to me, like
my mother, my father, or my brother.

So when I did lose Winki, I guess I resented my success. I love and appreciate all that I have now. But even today, if you
ask me or my mother if we’d trade places with our lives as they are now for what they were back when we had no money and were
living in the projects, we’d do it in a heartbeat if it meant getting Winki back. And the irony is, my career had reached
a high point at the time of my brother’s accident. Right before Winki died, I was on top of the world with a hit album and
a top ten single. I was nominated for a Grammy. I’d just had a ball doing a part in Spike Lee’s
Jungle Fever
. And then my brother passed, and I stopped caring. When I actually won the Grammy, it kinda made me smile, but only for a
second. There was too much sadness for me to be in the moment and really enjoy it. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. Shakim
begged me to get back into the studio. We had another album due, but I wasn’t interested.