In one of Marcel Johnson’s last posts, the frail fighter, whose body had begun showing the devastating effects of stomach cancer, sat on a couch and tied his son’s durag.
It was a Black dad rite of passage.
It was a ritual of care and nurturing.
It was a coming-of-age moment for a young man who had just gotten his hair braided for the first time and a father teaching his son what it means to care for himself.
On November 2 at 4:45 p.m. EST, Marcel Johnson passed away.
His wife, Taylor, who fought valiantly alongside him, made the announcement Tuesday through tears. And I’m not OK. None of the half-million of us who followed his fight from the beginning are.
Mostly because we needed this win. We needed the fourth-quarter comeback in which the tumors shrank, the weight came back, and Lil Daddy’s Cheesecake, the store he and his wife started, prospered. We needed the Disney movie ending for the family whose lives we had watched, loved and, perhaps, become a little too invested in.
They let the world into Marcel’s life, and for all the times they could have turned the camera off, they just kept zooming in. There was the time he took off his shirt to show his sagging skin, which had once held some 300 pounds and now draped over bones. Or the time he told his children that the monsters in his belly were winning. Or the moment when he finally made it to City of Hope, only to learn that he was too far gone to be helped.
To look back on those posts is to see not only a man who knew he was dying, but a brother pushing his wheelchair who couldn’t bring himself to look into the camera.
And Taylor held our hands through all of it. Tempering our expectations, dealing with the disappointments of medicines, doctors, hospital visits and insurance, and us. The unrelenting us who had never met Marcel but believed we had some input in his well-being.
She was kind to us as we flooded the comments with homeopathic remedies, prayers and suggestions. She even thought enough of us to come back to TikTok to tell people she doesn’t know that he had passed.
And I want to find a lesson in this, but at the moment, I’m just gutted. I’m also angry with God. This was a good one, and we know it because we watched him dance with his boys, poke fun at us and even joke about his cancer. We watched him laugh and cry with us. If anyone could have been saved, if anyone deserved that miraculous ending we were all praying for, it should have been Marcel.
We said it out loud. We prayed for him. We told people about his journey and his brave fight in the face of his diagnosis. Right up until the end, when he was barely awake and too frail to walk, talk or eat much, we still believed.
And maybe that’s the hardest part. We weren’t just watching a man fight cancer. We were watching a father fight to stay here. A husband fight to stay with his wife. A family fight for more time together.
Marcel was all the things a dad should be. From all the glimpses he showed us, he was vulnerable, caring, and goofy. He was a protector and a provider. He understood that fatherhood wasn’t just about keeping a roof over his children’s heads. It was about showing up, making them laugh, being tender, teaching them how to tie a durag, and letting them see that men can be soft, too.
He gave us glimpses of a good man loving his family in the most ordinary and extraordinary ways. And perhaps that’s what we should hold on to now.
I wish Marcel had gotten more time. I wish his children had gotten more birthdays, more dances, more goofy moments, and more afternoons with their father. I wish Taylor had gotten the future they were building together. I wish we had gotten our miracle.
But we didn’t.
What we did get was the privilege of witnessing a family love one another fiercely, even when the world was falling apart around them. We got to see a father be a father until his body would no longer let him. We got to see a wife refuse to let her husband face the fight alone.
And somewhere, there is a little boy who will grow up knowing that his father sat on a couch, even while he was sick, and took the time to tie his durag.
That is what I hope Marcel’s children remember. Not the tumors. Not the hospital beds. Not the videos of their father getting weaker.
The durag.
The dancing.
The laughter.
Their daddy.
We wanted Marcel to beat cancer. We wanted him to live. We wanted the ending we thought all that love and all those prayers could buy us.
We didn’t get that ending. But we got to see how he lived, and nobody can take that away from his family.
Rest, Marcel. You did your part. And you did it beautifully.
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