Essay + Poetry
Road to Respair
Respair is a return to hope after despair. Michael reflects on surviving suicide loss, finding community in grief, and allowing poetry to give the broken pieces a voice.
Read the full featureMike Check Manifesto
Art is not separate from public life. It is how we remember, question, grieve, celebrate, and move a community forward.
“Your thoughts deserve a voice.”
Featured Dispatch
Notes from the road.
Personal reflection meets community purpose in essays, poems, and observations from Michael’s lived experience.
Community • Grief • Healing
Road to Respair
How you grieve, when you grieve, and the capacity in which you grieve could very well be how you get out of your in-between.
Respair is defined as a return to hope after a period of despair; a portmanteau.
Giving yourself permission to walk with your grief is exactly what Ms. Kimberly Gilbert (Kim), founder of A Common Bond, is doing. In losing her brother to suicide, she saw gaps in the spaces in which families grieved loved ones. A Common Bond in Fayetteville, North Carolina gives individuals and families with kindred losses a place to connect and work on their grief journey together. This connection with A Common Bond found me on my journey for International Survivors of Suicide Loss (ISOSL) Day.
As a new volunteer with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, I learned about ISOSL Day and was able to be a part of this event. There, I met Kim and a group of individuals that I can now add to the integral parts of my grief journey. Our stories proved to be similar, but I soon discovered that we were all in different seasons in our healing.
Grieving alone can be consuming, but I found that grieving alongside other survivors brought out feelings that I did not have a voice for. There were two pieces of advice that I was able to leave with the group:
- Your thoughts deserve a voice.
- Focusing on the “what if’s” as a survivor of suicide loss takes away from your relationship with the person you lost.
In giving these words of wisdom, I knew this was information that I neglected to do myself. My biggest takeaway from the event was: “What do you do with the broken pieces?” Poetry has been my outlet for not just how I grieve, but how I celebrate my life and its experiences. I was able to share my poem “A Letter from Grief” that I am honored to say will now be a part of the grief packages that A Common Bond sends out to grieving families.
I dedicate this post to Christian Gregory King, who died by suicide in 2016. It is with great joy that I am able and willing to be an active agent on my road to respair. May this poem be a beacon to whoever reads it.
A Letter from Grief
Don’t worry, I’ll sit with you We can dangle our legs on tall chairs As our feet tell each other tall tales about how it used to be I’ll believe you When no one else can understand how you feel let those tears fall You’ve become so accustomed to holding them in When you meet me I know exactly where to start Don’t wipe them away I’ll catch you When your trust falls underground When you’re too afraid to scream out loud Send it to your heart and let me hear it I can’t help you remember unless you let me in I’ll never stop trying My door is always open Consider me a museum of your history with them I’m not jealous nor upset that you thought you could do this without me I’ve attached myself to every loss in your life Our meeting was inevitable — Sincerely, Grief
The Reading Room
Read it with rhythm.
Turn on a quiet, original blue-hour soundscape inspired by brass-band harmony and neo-soul calm. The music remains fully in your control.
Blue Hour
Mike Check reading-room soundscape
Mike Check reading-room soundscape
About
Michael Austin Jr.
Michael is an African American poet, musician, philanthropist, and political science graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His creative life is shaped by service, civic reflection, and the discipline of music—including his time marching saxophone with the North Carolina A&T Blue and Gold Marching Machine.
Mike Check brings those worlds together: the cadence of poetry, the memory held in music, and a belief that public life becomes more humane when people are brave enough to speak and listen.
Poet & WriterPersonal essays, poetry, and cultural reflection.
MusicianSaxophone and the living tradition of HBCU band culture.
Political ScienceUNCG graduate with a civic-minded perspective.
PhilanthropistCommunity service grounded in empathy and action.
The Journal
Writing in progress.
Mike Check will grow as Michael shares new poems, essays, performances, and community work.
Road to Respair
On grief, community, and returning to hope.
Poetry
A home for new work, readings, and reflections on the writing life.
Music & Movement
Stories from the band, the horn, and the rhythm that carries memory.