NANCY

wirra

It was a big deal for many reasons. Dad had never traveled outside of his own environment for Thanksgiving, let alone ceded the cooking responsibilities – and I mean every damn one of them, from apps to sides to mains to desserts – to anyone else. This was usually his time to shine, his finest hour as a provider. But things were decidedly different this year.

They had been last year, as well. But then again, last year having been 2020, things were decidedly different for most people. In the case of my family, however, our situation wasn’t so much pandemic-related as it was relative-related – that relative being my mother, a woman unaware she was about to partake in her final turkey day.

To be fair, she didn’t know it even had been Thanksgiving to begin with. The video chat we’d initiated had been a disaster, her confusion plain as day, written all over her face. Her face, which I’d just seen in person less than a month before and been alarmed by its weathering. Her face, which appeared even more aged only a few short weeks later. Her face, her face, her face.

“Do you remember what I did for Thanksgiving last year?” my father had asked shortly after his arrival. He wasn’t blowing smoke, nor playing a half-hearted joke; it was a profession of the ambiguity which defined this period in his life. In all our lives, really. Having not been there physically I only presumed their holiday went as it always had: Fos in the lead role, the kitchen his stage; my mother and her leech of a brother assuming their secondary roles as they awaited their feast.

Which, after some thought by my father, is both how it went and, well, didn’t. For my mother had hardly been in attendance, eating very little and speaking even less, while her oblivious sibling pontificated about the recent election, the results by which he’d been unsurprisingly disappointed. Dad had zoned out as he often had when my uncle spoke, conditioned to ignore. It was one of many traits he’d passed down to his sons.

“You know, it was just after then that things got bad,” he continued, as if things hadn’t already been bad. But I knew exactly what he’d been referencing, how one pre-dawn morning in early December he’d found his wife of four-plus decades outside in her pajamas, convinced the FBI had been watching her, convinced her husband had put a hit out on her, convinced her “fiancé” was on his way to pick her up and take her away.

I’d heard about it in real time over text, my brother contacting me the moment Dad had called upon him for reinforcements. My mother’s decline had proven more rapid than anticipated, the dementia that had crept its way into her brain – a brutal late-stage component of the disease which she’d been battling damn near fifteen years – having taken over. She’d become a shell of herself, an imposter; hardly the mother I knew and loved.

For the mother I knew and loved would have never kicked my father out of the house in which they’d raised their family. But things had gotten to the point where Dad was willing to try and do anything to just get to the next day, the next dose, the next moment of clarity. And so he’d packed his stuff and moved into a hotel right in the thick of the holiday season, the only line of communication to his wife coming by way of the 24/7 in-home nurse that had become a household fixture.

This was the first time Dad had ever acknowledged this period, one of which I thought would go unspoken. After all, so much had gone unspoken over the years, be it about Mom’s illness, be it about my parents’ relationship, be it about my own anxieties and apprehensions and addictions. Transparency had never really been my family’s strength.

But it had gotten better – albeit slowly. Mom’s decline could no longer go unnoticed, could no longer be disguised. My brother and I demanded answers after demanding our questions be heard, considered. And while we didn’t get much in return, we got something, little details into a profoundly complex situation that had been simplified to protect those on the immediate periphery.

This prompted Dad to text me every Sunday with a report on Mom’s health, rating her behavior (“today was a 7 out of 10”), offering details of her hallucinations and accusations. He’d moved back in about a week after being kicked out and recognized the importance in keeping us informed. That and he’d likely grown tired of me hounding him for news, for all but forcing myself to be involved even from 300 miles away.

Texts would later turn into phone calls, each of which helped to open the flood gates a little bit more. We spoke to one another in ways we’d rarely done so before; maybe a handful of occasions, notable more so by their infrequency than subject matter. Over 40 years on this planet and I was just getting to know the man who put me there. All it took was the deterioration of the other party responsible.

And then we had a spat just before my last birthday that had put much of our progress in jeopardy. We’d submitted ourselves to one another so significantly it had left us raw, vulnerable, quick to hurt and long to heal. The argument proved pointless and we moved on from it, for our own petty differences were far outweighed by the greater matter at hand: Mom.

She passed two months later, in June. That morning I had awoken to separate texts from both my brother and father wishing me a happy Father’s Day, followed shortly by those asking I contact them immediately. I knew what was coming. To be frank, I had been waiting for it for months.

Later that day I admitted this to my father. He, who was surprised by my mother’s passing. He, who hadn’t given up hope that his wife could maybe one day overcome this horrific disease. He, who had been there every step of the way. “Really, Matthew?” he responded, though unconvincingly. He’d known, too.

“I think it was probably three years ago when I started really noticing,” Dad would say soon after Thanksgiving dinner had concluded. We’d moved into my living room where I’d begun to deejay, Dad playing requester, the songs of our past radiating off the turntable. Many of his requests came with reasons; more accurately, stories. Tales of he and Mom when they were kids, still dating, hitting up Huey’s with the gang, seeing 10cc at the Cinderella Theater, young love in bloom and blossoming.

But this conversation had started with regards to grief, how unique one’s grieving process can be. I spoke candidly of my own process, how much of a roller coaster the previous few months had been. Dad offered his side, prompting his observation of Mom’s decline, all but stating he’d started his process then.

Which made sense, really. He was further along in his process than I, and it showed. In fact, it had been the talking point at my mother’s memorial. “Your Dad looks great! He seems like he’s doing really well.” had been the general consensus, one filled with equals parts fascination and confusion.

But the general consensus hadn’t a clue he’d said goodbye long before Mom left us. Though later than that of my old man, I too said goodbye before she passed: the previous October I’d moved back home to help care for her when things had reached a critical point. It was then I recognized she was lost and gone forever, never to return. It was then I began to grieve.

And it’s now in which I continue to do so. For grief is a never-ending process. It reduces us to our weakest levels, challenges our every thought and emotion, encumbers us like a heavy blanket that can’t be unshed. And yet grief can also be unifying; it can strengthen us in ways we’ve never considered let alone imagined. It exposes us, opens us up, leaving us susceptible for pain but hungry to fill the void.

And fill it we do with transparency. With sincerity. With love. Dad and I moved on from one record to the next, one story to the next, filling void after void as the tryptophan did its best to stop us. But we soldiered on. Because in grief, that’s all one can do.

MJP

12.10.21