Grief is Not Siloed: Maggie Sepada interviews Shanda McManus
Shanda McManus, a family medicine physician and native Philadelphian, writes about the intersection of life, race, and medicine. Shanda’s writing has appeared in Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Midnight & Indigo, Bellevue Literary Review, and swamp pink. She has been a fellow with PEN America Emerging Voices in Creative Nonfiction and Baldwin for the Arts.
From Editorial Assistant Maggie Sepeda: Brother Epistles is a deeply intimate and powerful conversation between McManus and her brother, Monir, in the form of letters she writes to him years after he was killed in a drive-by shooting. It reckons head-on with grief, love, institutionalized racism, and family in tender and heartbreaking prose.
Maggie Sepeda: The opening words of each chapter, “Dear Monir,” in handwriting, create an almost sacred space, like a ritual or a repeated prayer, calling to mind the choice of the word “Epistles” in the title. Why did you choose to begin each chapter this way?
Shanda McManus: Dear Monir put me in a space where I felt like it was just him and me. Sometimes, while writing, I would imagine us just kicking it while I drove. The address acted as an entry point into a liminal place where I could be with my brother again. Also, Dear Monir, as form, acted as a liturgical device signaling something spiritual outside of the natural world and shaped what became the book.
MS: At what point did these letters shift from a private experience with your brother to something you knew would be read by strangers? Did that shift change how you wrote?
SM: While working on these letters that became Brother Epistles, I kept myself in a private space where there was no one but him and me. I intentionally tried to keep the thoughts of who would read this work out. I needed to feel free to say what I wanted to really say. Letting the idea of readers in would have censored the content. I resisted the shift to the public gaze because I wanted to stay as honest as I could.
MS: Can you tell me a bit about the experience of writing something so tenderly intimate and personal?
SM: Writing this book unearthed so many buried experiences and emotions. I felt profound sorrow, regret, joy, love—an entire spectrum of intense feeling. I hurt but at the same time healed in a way I thought was impossible. Before this book, I had an active wound festering and draining my soul, but now I have a scar in that place. When I finished Brother Epistles, my brother, whom I missed so much, was resurrected—I got him back.
MS: At the cemetery, you feel Monir’s arm around your shoulders, you recognize his hand, and then he’s gone. You write that you realized he’d been with you all along. It reads like a moment of integration—not getting him back but realizing that he’s been within you this whole time. How would you describe this experience?
SM: Supernatural. Holy. I remembered a line from the song “Amazing Grace”: Was blind but now I see. I had the epiphany that death had not separated us—I had by not looking and revisiting the grief and pain because with the pain was everything else that was my brother. His life, his love, his light.
MS: You’ve said that whenever you thought of Monir, you thought of his murder, not him. Has writing this book changed that for you?
SM: Absolutely. In the book, I looked at the murder, really looked, and along with that looked at all my feelings about my brother’s death. Before writing these letters, I shut down memory and emotion like a tourniquet to save myself. But I finally gave space to all that hurt and pain in this book, and when I did, I could see and feel everything that my brother was and is to me. So yes, I feel the grief, but now also the joy. Makes me think of the Frankie Beverly song “Joy and Pain.”
MS: The passage about teaching your son what to do during a traffic stop, alongside the memory of Monir blowing smoke in a cop’s face—those two scenes go together in a deeply poignant way. This seems to be a through line in Brother Epistles, a powerful connection through moments and time. How would you characterize this?
SM: The past, present, and future are intertwined; they don't exist as separate spaces. What is now is an echo of the before and what will come after. I think about how our bodies are a living example of this truth. We carry the genetic makeup of our ancestors, and we pass it into the future through our children. Memory and time seem to work this way, too.
MS: You write that grief is not five stages but a spiral and a repeating loop where time is not linear. As a physician who learned grief in just one lecture in medical school, how else has your understanding of what grief is changed through writing this book? And has writing changed your experience of grief?
SM: What I came to understand in a real and personal way through the experience of writing this book is that grief is not siloed but woven through my being and my every day. I learned that having grief threaded through my life is OK. In fact, allowing myself to acknowledge and carry my grief has led me to greater joy and love for life. Grief is love. Now I am able to embrace beauty and love more fully, when before I could not because I had not embraced grief.
MS: In the book, you describe a sense of falling into a narrow space where you belong neither to where you came from nor to where you are now. Has that perception changed for you, if at all?
SM: I think now I feel like I have a foot or part of myself in each place, even though I live in the space between. In a sense, I can claim the unique lens I have because I don’t belong, but am at the same time a part of each place. I guess I have more comfort with being in between.
MS: Readers will come to this book carrying their own losses. Some will share the specific weight of losing someone to gun violence; others will recognize the grief but not the circumstances. What do you hope a reader whose loss looks nothing like yours takes away?
SM: For the readers who come to this work with their own unique and varied losses, I want them to take away the knowledge and accept the truth that the grief they carry never goes away and will always color the life they lead. But despite that, they can go on, experience the joy and love that life brings, even though they carry this pain. Grief does not really end or is something to get over and be done with. This is the takeaway: grief and love are inseparable, so don’t be afraid to open your heart to both.
MS: So, are you working on any projects right now, and should we be on the lookout for any new work from you?
SM: My next project is ROOTWORK, a researched literary memoir that explores how my North Philadelphia family made sense of illness and misfortune through hoodoo, which is the folk belief system created by enslaved Africans that offers a supernatural framework for understanding suffering that conventional medicine simply cannot address. It's a book about what happens when two belief systems collide: the world of diagnosis and treatment I entered as a physician, and the world of roots and conjure my grandmother never left.