Coming Home: On Returning to A Parent's Final Place of Rest

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Coming Home: On Returning to A Parent'sFinal Place of RestbyMark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan
Inmy mind home had always been that place where my parents resided.  This is not to say that I don't have ahome that I share with a wife and two daughters, but that the very idea ofgoing home—to some mythical, long past moment—was always concretely related tothe place where my parents resided. I can't say that my home as a child was particularly warm; morefunctional than anything, and that is not to say that I didn't know that I wasloved, since I was indeed Arthur and Elsie's baby-boy and only child.  My father's matter-of-fact way of going to work, six days a week, without comment or complaint (and in the shadow of mymother's out-sized personality) continues to color my workman-like approach toeverything from writing, to cooking Sunday morning breakfast (as he did),parenting and marriage. 
Thesensibility that my father bequeathed to me, his son, may have been hisgreatest gift in the months immediately after his death.  He died in his sleep one Februarynight, with his 73rd birthday a few months on the horizon, asmatter-of-factly as he lived, with little fuss.  In the spirit of my mother and father's ying and yang, meantthat I was left with ying, unhinged by the death of her mother and husband amonth apart that winter.   Andunhinged is how I might have described my own state in those months followingmy father's death, my untreated hypertension out-of-control, closing out whathad been nearly three-years of sleeplessness, in which I slept no more thanfour hours of sleep a night. 

Thecloseted demons in my head that I kept at bay, by staying awake as often asphysically possible—and by always punching the keys—were loosed sometime in thespring after my father's death, when the reality hit, that my mother could nottake care of herself anymore; the demons have not returned to their closets.Even when I slept, I cried, lamenting my inability to care for my own mother,putting her in a nursing home, with the faint voices of elders suggesting thatBlack folk don't do that.  It wasall that I could do to keep my sanity.
Mypenance would be having to destroy my home—the Bronx apartment that my parentsshared for the final thirty-two years of their marriage and that my motherbarely survived five months in without her husband.   That home had become the site of a few bad memories,baby-boy spreading his wings in a career and life, that nobody in that littleproject apartment could have imagined when the three of us moved there in thespring of 1976, from our tenement building in the South Bronx that happened toalso house a yet unknown Hip-Hop feminist.   I suspect that my mother expected that I would alwayshave a presence in that apartment, she wanted to keep me as close to her, withthe same force, that she fled her own mother's home, at age sixteen, leavingBaltimore and settling in New York City, returning occasionally for shortfamily trips, almost always without my father who was, of course, working. 
WhenI chose to fly or flee, my mother laid the blame initially at the feet of thewoman who would marry her son and finally at the feet of that son and hisambition, an ambition that she indeed cultivated, not quite knowing it wouldreproduce in me (and later her grand-daughters) the very independence that kepther and her own mother at arms length until that last phone-call, literally onthe eve of my grand-mother's passing. I have also come to understand that the dementia that would ravage mymother's mind like wildfires in August, might have already been at play; I wastoo ambitious to notice.
Andso in the spring of 2009, thirty-three years after I first walked into thatBronx apartment, it became my punishment to throw away the life that my parentshad built for a son (and perhaps his family), who had little interest in cominghome.  It was a sad joke to hearthe unknowing and the never knowing, ask if I was gonna hold an estate sale,not quite understanding that my parents stuff—piles and piles of shitreally—were the kinds  things thatno one wanted, even their son. Even the stacks of vinyl records that were once the greatest bondbetween a father and a son, had given way to new technologies. My father wasnever gonna listen to those Mighty Clouds of Joy albums that I had digitizedtwo years earlier.  Piece by piece,over several months, and with a little help from my wife and a best-friend,whose friendship was even older than the time my parents spent in thatapartment, I gutted that apartment; gutted my home.
Iperiodically dream that I am back in that apartment, aged 16, my wings about totake flight, windows wide open and both my parents are there with me, and IsaacHayes's Black Moses in playing in thebackground.  There are also dreamsof some breezy future that will never happen, where we are all wearing white,their grand-daughters bringing them scones and real cream for their coffee,sitting in a house that looks quite like the one I live in now.
Truthis, when my mother finally went home in the summer of 2009, I matter-of-factlymarked the occasion, as my father might have, had he been as ambitious as me.  My blood pressure dropped twenty pointsthe day after. I had been mourning the woman that had been my mother since myfather's death; the last time she remotely resembled that woman.  Fittingly, my mother died and wasburied in Baltimore, the very place she fled from  as a teen-ager exactly fifty-years earlier, only to be buriednext to the woman she had fled from in the first place, along with my father'sremains.  I had stopped calling NewYork—The Bronx—my home, I had no home, and no parents to return to, somethingthe younger, more ambitious version of myself could have never fathomed.
Ona recent October morning, I returned to that cemetery for the first time sincemy mother was lowered into the earth.   Though my trip to Baltimore had been planned months inadvance and I had already made arrangements to spend some time with one of myaunts, the thought of visiting my parents' gravesite  never once crossed my mind. Yet as I drove into the cityfrom the airport, I could hear my parents calling to me; they wanted me tovisit.  As if choreographed inadvance, I spent several minutes trudging in the wet grass, searching for theirstone markers.  It was only as Icomplained out-loud that it was typical of them to put me through suchchanges—I was checking my watch for a presentation that I would never make—thatI stumbled over their marker. 
Itwas a matter-of-fact reunion—reinforced by the auntie, who later in the carasked me more than a few times if I was okay—as I told them how proud theywould be of their grand-daughters, both of whom possess their grandmother'sspirit, to my daily dismay.  Ithanked them, for imagining a future for their baby-boy, that none of us couldhave ever expected, but that they had indeed planned for, not with money, butrather matter-of-factly.  I clearedtheir stones of cut grass and that of my grandmother, and was back in the carminutes later;  back to myambition.