Where Do Broken Hearts Go?

"And if somebody loves you, won't they always love you."- Whitney Houston

By now, we all know that one of the greatest singers known to man has passed and I have been questioning myself about how to address it in this blog.

For one thing, I didn’t expect for the death of Whitney Houston to affect me as much as it had. In the end, it’s because I realized that Whitney was so tangible to so many of us. Through her music and through her craziness, it was easy to feel like I knew someone like her and almost like I knew her.

When she released her first album, I was three years old with the Fisher-Price radio and man, I thought I could sing. When I was around eight years old, I went to Cedar Point and belted out “I Will Always Love You” to be recorded on cassette tape for younger family members to laugh at years later. I’m sure hyenas would crack up as well. In high school, “My Love Is Your Love” came out right around the time when I was dealing with an ignorant ass negro who didn’t realize what he had. While in college, everybody slept on the Just Whitney album, but something about “Try It On My Own” spoke to an independent streak that was erupting within me and continues to until this day. Too many of my musical memories were wrapped around this woman.

And then there were the flaws. Let me just say that as soon as I told my dad about her death, he blamed Bobby Brown and went on a tirade about associating with the wrong man. That was his little lecture. Hell, Bobby Brown wasn’t the best influence in the world, but you can’t say Whitney didn’t love him. Hell, they were married for 15 years and many of the people who faulted their union couldn’t sustain a marriage for a third of that. They loved hard.

We also can’t forget “crack is whack”. Who in the world would admit to the all the drugs they used in a nationally-televised interview? But she did and when asked who is the devil, she said that she was because it was her making the decisions. Oddly, that made me more of a fan because there a sense of accountability there when everyone else wanted to put it off on someone else.

So yeah, I am a little brokenhearted right now because not only has the world lost a great talent, but we also lost someone who showed what it is to love hard and to be unapologetically honest. In this world, that combination is so rare.