Donnell Durham

Donnell Durham was taken too soon, leaving behind the kind of absence that doesn’t stay neatly contained to one address or one family. He was 59, a Black man from Detroit, Michigan, and the fact of his death is all that’s been placed into the open here—bare, unfinished, and aching with the sense that there should be more to say.

When a life ends to violence, the world often rushes to the next headline, the next siren, the next urgent story. But for the people who knew Donnell, time ...