It has been one week since Mom’s memorial service and I am surprised each time I have another epiphany the first time I’m having an experience since Mom’s death. I continue to adjust to living in this liminal era with one-parent-alive and one-parent-dead, which is a holding pattern until I enter the ultimate phase of both-parents-dead.
I woke up Monday morning and before I sat up in bed, I noticed how that was my first time waking up in the Rocky Mountains since Mom’s death. Three cousins on Mom’s side of the family tree, out of seven who are still alive, attended the memorial, two of whom had RSVPed and one who surprised us by arriving with his dad and a handful of condolences cards from his mom. As I told the sixty friends and family who’d gathered with us on midday Saturday, Dad had been telling us stories a few nights beforehand about his first visit to Akron. The only sibling I named in my remarks was Uncle Ron and Aunt Henrietta as I channeled some of the outrage that’s been coursing through me in the six weeks since Mom’s death into a few choice sentences to describe the realities of tension that Dad and Mom navigated in their early 20s.
None of my White cousins spoke, though they sat at a table in the center of the room, while multiple Black family members and friends stood to share a memory — memory, which N. Scott Momaday describes in The Way to Rainy Mountain as:
that experience of the mind which is legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural.
I knew that . I knew that in semi-public spaces, my family tended to not give voice to the uncomfortable, that there’s a shame that pervades our origin story because of the animosity between the Denver/Akron version of the Hatfields & McCoys, the 1960s’ Montague and Capulets who failed to stifle or kill the love, curiosity and intrigue that Mom and Dad kindled in each other despite the innumerable cultural forces that frowned upon them.
My brother could talk about hearing the mulatto distinctions of Danzy Senna’s biography on NPR, but he receded from talking about the petty yet monumental schisms that scarred our ancestors. Fortunately, I wrote down my jumbled thoughts and feelings a few days beforehand. I still left out some poignant specifics of Mom’s life that linger inside of me. I did defy the old family norm to acquiesce to White silence with more silence and in doing so, I attested to what defined Mom’s life, who dyed our family in the previous generation.
I had some sense that describing Mom’s parents by stating how they “relinquished fear and racism” was my way of seeing both Mom and Dad. Mom is dead and not here physically but Dad was sitting closest to me. Of the 13 speakers, a few of them talked about how right Mom was. Somebody asked “who in this room was at their wedding?” and seven people, most of whom were Dad’s family, raised their hands. When I said what I said, I dignified Dad and all the Black people, all the people of color, rather than pretend that we were all good, a multicultiboho side show.
reckoning (noun):
- count; computation; calculation.
- the settlement of accounts, as between two companies.
- a statement of an amount due; bill.
- an accounting, as for things received or done.
Synonyms: retribution, judgment - an appraisal or judgment.
- Navigation. dead reckoning.
- day of reckoning.
Afterwards, as we began to clean up, I asked Dad how he felt now that the memorial was over and he said how what I said and how I’d hosted was “perfect.”
More Momaday:
the journey recalled is among other things the revelation of one way in which these traditions are conceived, developed, and interfused in the human mind.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 