One aspect of Mom’s death last Saturday is how each of us is moving through emotions and feeling in the days afterwards. Over the last seven days, it’s been most evident to me with Dad.
Throughout my life, he expressed little of his feelings. His propensity to go along with whatever Mom’s preferences were became a running joke when I was a teenager. By the time I was a young adult, I was irked by his go-along-ness because I harbored a conviction that he must have his own ideas and own wishes deep inside. One way I imagined him becoming more expressive would be him telling us what he wanted to do for the weekend. Sometimes he would, but oftentimes, he’d go with others’ wishes. I sought small ways of being more expressive, and asking him how he wanted to spend a weeknight was clearly less than asking him to reveal vulnerable feelings such as hurt, irritation, or despondency, or to ask him about the quality of his relationship with his father.
In the course of a 10-14 minute conversation earlier this week, I repeatedly heard his voice crack, whimpering as a sentence spilled out of his mouth.
In these first days after her death, I am describing singular moments in my day, simple and concrete descriptions rather than taking about theoretical topics. I don’t have a desire to talk about abstractions right now as they feel too distracting, too irrelevant when feeling grief. So, we shared mundane updates—including one that was comical and absurd, what I imagine must have been a short phone call from his brother-in-law, who told Dad how he “was a good man” that Mom really loved him. I don’t know if my uncle said it aloud to express his thanks to Dad or respect the relationship that his younger sister had with Dad. I don’t know what Ron’s intent was or the significance of what he was saying. But, for me, it was a bitter type of comical, as I remember how Mom’s siblings have been soured by racism longer than I’ve been alive. Maybe I feel pissed that my aunts’ and uncles’ racism was so all-encompassing (for the last 15 years or 57 years, each span of time has a different marker) that my uncle can only express respect four days after his sister is dead.
And I hurt that he called her once in the last month to leave a mealy-mouthed voicemail saying how he loved her. That may have been the last message he shared with her because he didn’t have the courage, the capability, the emotional capacity to drive into Denver and come visit her in person as she laid in bed at home.
I have a distaste for men being so convoluted with their emotions, so shut off from the emotional quadrant and the psychological quadrant of their life that they don’t tell other people: appreciations, sensitive details, vulnerable conversations. Instead, I see so many men living a non-expressive life terrified of their own feelings.
I have been noticing my bothered bitterness towards Mom’s siblings and my cousins. Not that I want to communicate with them; but I am more aware of how they ostracized her in waves: in the 16 years since their dad died, in the 57 years since Mom married Dad, choosing a life with huge unknowns rather than be bound by the constraints of what she’d known in the first 22 years of her family. And I wonder how those rounds of pushing Mom away were similar to what they’d done when they were growing up in Akron. Maybe they were pushing her away because she was resolute in moving in a direction beyond Akron, disregarding what felt safe and nurturing to her younger sisters but may have been suffocating for Mom.
As Mom’s death neared, I called Dad one day to gauge how he was doing and feeling, to ask him a few questions. He made a comment about how he and Mom have lived long lives, we had been a lucky family that had been spared tremendous hurt (or some other indignities, though that wasn’t his vernacular). I responded to him by saying how he and Mom endured decades of hostility and resentment, daily combos of institutional and interpersonal racism by her three siblings and their descendants. I recall how 20 years ago, my brother attempted to make a joke about our grandfather uttering nigger when speaking to Dad. Grandpa may have apologized and acknowledged the wrong almost immediately after it came out of his mouth. But, I was always bewildered and bothered by my brother’s false levity. There was nothing funny about the disdain of that word. I am convinced that it slips out of a grown man’s mouth because he isn’t turning inwards with introspection, so he can dredge up these forms of domination and legacies of violence in order to name them and discuss how atrocious they are and reveal how much I want to be free from those old inheritances as colonized people in recovery from subjugation.
That’s some change I want to be a part of in 3 generations or less: from my father, uncles and older men onto my son, nephews, niblings, and boys around me.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 