Nonfiction

I left the family farmhouse with shovel in hand and walked the two miles to the graveyard. I began digging and was stopped only by chance, the parish priest having noticed me while he walked the few steps between the rectory and the church. He asked what I was doing. “My grandfather’s trapped. I have to get him out.” The priest brought me back to my mother, who had not noticed my absence in this tiny hamlet and was horrified by my digging. I was five years old. My grandfather had died in Switzerland within the prior year, while we were “home” in New York City.

I called my maternal grandfather “Bab” which actually means “father” in Romansch, the little-known fourth national language of Switzerland. He and I were often separated by continents but he was always present in my mind and heart. His Stan Laurel face with a handlebar mustache; his smile like the Cheshire Cat’s crescent grin; his baritone calling me down to dinner from the attic, my private kingdom; the sweet smell of pipe tobacco that heralded his homecoming from the fields; the grasp of his hand and his elegant stride as we walked through the village with ice-cream as our destination.

Both he and my grandmother, Tatta, were so kind to their “foreign” grandchild that even at the age of four when I unpenned their small flock of five sheep and guided them to a nearby meadow to graze– it was that kind of village– there was no anger. There was worry, however, because I did it so very early in the morning, told no one, then fell asleep in a sink-hole in the meadow as the sheep formed a circle around me as if to provide protection. Upon being found by a posse of villagers sent out to search for me, Mom was not happy. When she saw the smiles on her parents’ faces that extended to the crinkles around their eyes, she could not help but smile and laugh as well. I was not such a foreigner after all.

Bab was always there. Until he wasn’t. And I never got to say a proper goodbye. Though I spent most of my first five years of life in this alpine village of 600 people, he died while I was in America and I lost what may have been the home of my heart with his passing.

As a child I could not articulate the reasons why his loss impacted me so greatly, but I grew to understand it. The loss of Bab, and the void that followed, led me to free him from the ground because this gentle and accepting man knew how to treat a child, unlike my paternal grandfather, Nonny, and unlike my Dad who was unable be so kind and attentive.

“Something is wrong with Carlo,” my mother Amalia began pleading when I was three as his whole family denied Dad’s increasingly strange behavior. They denied the truth despite his shirking of financial responsibilities toward his wife and child, and in spite of his beating my mother and brutalizing her emotionally. She never told Bab anything but, apparently, he and Tatta sensed the obvious that something was wrong as she was spending so much time in Switzerland rather than her adopted homeland and City, without my Dad who visited Switzerland only once. They told her to stay with them, but she was too independent (and perhaps too proud to burden them) and had long ago become the only person in a generation to escape the village environs for the wider world.

The serenity and beauty of the Alps gave way to the chaos and concrete of mid-1970s New York City, then at its lowest point, and I initially accepted the urban menace of Dad as routine as the garbage in the streets, the homeless on the corners, and the run-down tenements dotting the landscape.

Mom’s situation was made more difficult by the fact that my Italian-American paternal grandparents lived in a tenement building adjacent to ours on the Lower East Side. Their kitchen and rear-room windows were parallel to our kitchen window, and linked by a small clothesline which occasionally delivered a dollar bill for me. But this meant that if my mother had a restless night, they– somehow– saw the kitchen light and questioned her about it the next day. She learned to draw the blinds.

She lived under these conditions with my Dad and with his parents for years. One day he followed her to my school when she dropped me off after lunch. He slammed her against a wall and began to choke her in front of everyone she even remotely knew. I stood by, mouth agape, a powerless second-grader surrounded by my classmates and their moms. It was this public display of private pain that finally forced her to fight for dignity. She called the police and had him arrested. He was promptly placed in Bellevue Psychiatric Center for evaluation where he was diagnosed as a paranoid-schizophrenic with audio-visual hallucinatory tendencies. Naturally they did not hold him long enough, then prescribed some medication that he did not take and for which he was not monitored, and provided no follow-up support to him or to her. NYC was just holding-on to life itself and did little for those most fragile.

Fear and madness surrounded my mother and I for a long time but after the arrest and brief involuntary hold in Bellevue, she finally had the opportunity to change the locks on our apartment door. Dad could no longer hide in the apartment and crouch like a beast waiting to spring on its prey. Nonny had the gall to question her decision once Dad got out, saying “What happened? Carlo could not get into the apartment today.” She marched us away in silence. Nonny was left to stand alone on the sidewalk between the two buildings.

No humanity or sympathy was offered to a woman driven to extremes in order to protect herself and her son. Nonny and Nonna told my mother that they would rather have died than have their son arrested. They directly blamed her for his condition which built a wall of resentment and separation between herself and her in-laws.

With great difficulty I learned how to reconcile the differences between the happy “sitcom families,” the seemingly happy families of my friends, and my own family far too late. With a grandfather who embodied all the negative stereotypes of the “old country” and a Dad whose character was often that of a more maniacal Cuckoo-era Nicholson, I came to feel that happy families existed only on television and in the minds of those deluded by its messages of a society where mom’s apple pie and the white-picketed house still held their mythic power. Mom could not bake, and my fence was that which blocked-off the road-salt depot underneath the Manhattan Bridge that we children routinely broke into in order to climb and slide along its mountains, to return home with raw skin covered in coarse, grey dust.

It was difficult for Mom but I was generally ignorant (or denying) of much of what was going on. Wasn’t it normal for a child of eight to be sleeping with his mother for protection, a bat underneath the bed? I thought every Dad threw filled book-cases out of a third-story tenement window to crash on the pavement as mother and child fled for safety. It seemed almost ordinary for a Dad to believe that society was out to get him, hearing voices of conspiracy broadcast from a wall and seeing silhouettes spring to action. I didn’t know how wrong this was and couldn’t have done anything if I did.

Only once was I confused and truly scared. Mom was hospitalized with injuries I found out as an adult were caused by Dad’s beatings. Bizarrely, he became my caregiver during this period of time. One night, long after my seven-ish self was asleep, I was suddenly shaken awake.

“Huh? Dad.. wuz sleepin’. Why’d you wake me?”

“Get dressed. We have to leave, now.” And I did, barely awake and not knowing what was happening, sliding into my Winter coat.

Dad simply took us next door, to his parents’ apartment, where we sat in the back room with no lights on as he intently watched the windows of my own apartment. Nonna heard us enter and asked, “Carlo, what is wrong?” to which he answered, “Nothing, ma, just go back to sleep.”

We sat. We watched. In the dark. No words, except a heightened “Shushhh!!” when I tried to ask what was going on.

Finally, he spoke. “It’s okay now, we can go back.” We did, I undressed, and spent a sleepless night worrying if there was any real danger to us or to me in specific. I never told Mom.

As I grew a little older and understood the situation a little better, music and reading became the means by which I might briefly escape unacknowledged pain around and inside me. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis was a touchstone: Children living through wartime transported to a magical realm where they could be strong and heroic. Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” unintentionally haunted me with its refrain that a child could grow to become like his father. And Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics of immersing oneself into books and poetry for safety equally resonated because I internalized so much of what I experienced and the only outward expression of “trauma” was voracious reading, constant over-eating, and at age ten suddenly proclaiming to my mother that I would no longer respond to her in any language other than English (I then had three others, including the dying Romansch).

What was an essentially single mother to do with a stubborn child like me? “Buggas ti chinchar en Romansch cun mi?!” No, I did not wish to speak Romansch, but I will happily eat a foil-wrapped, frozen Ring Ding or four. The why of this stance took me many decades to understand: I simply felt that Switzerland was– and forever would be– in our past. By then Tatta had died and my mother was unable to honor and mourn her except from afar as we had no money to travel home. The early morning call with the sad news woke us both and she– so very, very strong– cried in the pale morning light as I stood by unable to comfort her. I must have sensed little utility and too many memories in these “foreign tongues” and so I rejected them. I, indeed, became a foreigner to Switzerland with my tongue-tied mouth and in my heart and in real life due to my reaction to our circumstances: An English-only, hyphenated Italian-American just because of my name, with little family beyond my Italian grandparents across the clothesline.

Today, I try to place myself into Nonny and Nonna’s position in order to better understand them. Two uneducated farm-workers coming to America in search of employment, they had little time or desire for anything other than work and saving– never spending!– money. True family was virtually non-existent as their closest blood-relatives remained in Italy with whom they were engaged in mutual vendettas. They allowed few friendships and even the few knew little of my grandparents’ thoughts since they maintained a curtain of secrecy. Confidence and confidantes were not words that applied to their lives.

Their children, my father and my aunt Angela, were never given more than the basic necessities in material goods or emotional love and care. Their childhood seems to have been little better than a boot-camp with a specific daily routine that spanned years. And if Master Sergeant Nonny wasn’t listened to, they were being disrespectful and rebellious and got the belt. There is not one childhood photo of my Dad and his sister with a smile on their faces.

Nonny was a disciplinarian know-it-all who took pride when I called him “Il Duce” after Mussolini when I was a tween, not catching the sarcasm in my comment. He was quick to judge and felt that he was the fount of all wisdom on the planet. He challenged my choice of boyhood friends who were mostly Black, Hispanic, and Asian and decidedly not the diminishing remnant of neighborhood Italian boys whose prejudices and attempted swagger disgusted me. “My friends are my friends because ofhow they are and not what they are.” Nonny did not like this back-talk and made sure to let me know it, but it momentarily silenced him.

Nonna was a less judgmental and a more reserved woman who followed rather than lead except when it came to her household. He took care of the business– banking, bills, and such. She cooked and cleaned and rarely visited the world outside the four walls of their three-room railroad apartment except for church and neighborhood shopping among the few remaining Italian shop-keepers with whom she best communicated. I went to Italian Mass with her on many early mornings. We stood among the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their small convent chapel. She sang there, only there, not well but robustly and full of joy. Still, she did not balance out Nonny’s imperial and unkind nature, had her own less extreme pettiness and opinions, and so was an accomplice of sorts to his actions.

Since zero financial assistance was given by Nonny and Nonna, and certainly not from Dad, the little money my mother had went to support me as best she could. By the time Dad was forced out of the house, and I later began school, my mother did the only thing possible at the time: She entered the welfare system rather than asking for familial help which should have been freely given.

She had no one to turn to, no family and few friends to whom she could tell the horrible truth she was living. Oh, the entire neighborhood knew, make no mistake, it was still that tribal and insular back then. I had to force a smile at the jokes of schoolmates saying “Your Dad makes license plates for a living” because they heard about him being jailed. For Mom, much worse: The embarrassment of her situation, coupled with Dad threatening and cursing at her female friends on the street, isolated her from any sort of tenderness. She began working off-the-books– cleaning homes and tending to other people’s children– to supplement welfare, food stamps, and to free herself of dependency on the government (which she did within two years).

Mom once served as a British nanny in her teens– her first exposure to the world beyond the village made possible by her efforts as a chambermaid and waitress in luxury Swiss ski hotels. In these roles, she met Gene Kelly whose toupee she once refastened, walked backwards to serve the Aga Khan tea, and was questioned by the CIA regarding what she heard/knew about a particular Hollywood family that may have had Communist inclinations. It was this family that hired her as a nanny. Because of her British experiences, Mom generally embodied their saying to “Keep calm and carry on.” Her pains and suffering in NYC were real, as were her worries for me, but she subsumed most of those feelings by incessantly working both for others and within our home.

She worked, ate scraps from less scrupulous employers, saved and saved, and moved-up to eventually serve as housekeeper/household manager/confidante to Broadway actor- and producer-types who cherished her as a person and properly rewarded her work ethic. She even was entrusted to be the nervous depositor of bags of gold bars into some private, midtown vault that the wealthy have for such things.

Sadness and negativity were rarely part of Mom’s disposition, ever, and she regularly sang as she worked… most often the songs from childhood TV shows like Sesame Street or The Magic Garden that we watched together in less anxiety-filled times. Her attitude was a lesson I learned well but which– for me– also meant burying my own conflicted feelings so deeply that I did not acknowledge or deal with them and also threw myself too much into work later in life.

But my Dad…

A life where one feels boxed-in, surrounded, and constantly watched is difficult to imagine. To feel that you are the world’s center of attention is horrible. To actually believe that the world is inherently biased against you is unlivable. And to think that you are the only person whois going and can go through this is the most awful form of solitary confinement that exists.

Everyone is the enemy.

The cops and The Mob. The Jews. And the government. The mailman and the bartender. The Blacks. The unions. Your parents and your wife. Everyone.

 Everyone except me.

For me, Dad felt only the loss of a son and it was never otherwise. I was never beaten, never accused of any treason. But he knew that he lost me on many levels, though his mind’s denial and amnesiac fury would not tell him why. And, when I was older, if I told him about any incident, he would say I was crazy because none of that had ever happened.

Ironically, Dad also encouraged my escapism by introducing me to comic book super-heroics at a younger age. We had an “in” at The Green Ghost comic shop on First Street and First Avenue which we could visit even when the store was closed. These heroes championed justice and protected the endangered innocents and victims. I yearned to be the hero, not yet knowing what responsibilities come with that role. My love of film likewise came from him as we spent many a weekend at double-features. He brought me to the opening day of Star Wars before anyone knew what a sensation it would be. And he taught me to swim in the choppiest waters along New York City’s shores, Rockaway Beach.

There were other adventures as well. A mob-owned bar down the block, where I often sat drinking ginger-ale as Dad spoke with the last of the local wise guys, became a petting zoo one day. Dad brought me over, we entered the bar but exited through its rear entrance to its small concrete backyard to find… “A tiger! Can I pet it?” “You can do whatever you want, son.” Not only did I pet this cub, I wrestled it for about ten minutes before it began to get too “frisky” and Dad finally pulled me away. I never asked where the cub came from, or why it was there, knowing even then that there are some people to whom you do not pose questions. 

I will say this for Dad during his better days: He encouraged my reading and helped me to expand it as I grew older so I could discern and analyze different socio-political perspectives and make wiser, more informed decisions of my own. As a high-schooler, my grandparents’ table was routinely covered by The New York Times, the New York Post, The Village Voice (an alternative, progressive newspaper), and The Amsterdam News (an African-American focused paper). I read them all, and we discussed stories that were shared among them and how they differed in content and focus, and so he taught me critical thinking. 

I do forever cherish these positive moments as they provide balance to Dad’s darker side, but I wish there were many, many more of them that could outshine the others.

Until at least my late-thirties, I used to blame Dad for not helping himself stay stable and maintain his medication protocols. I grew to realize that he couldn’t, that the world he lived in would not allow it. He was both the sole jailkeeper and sole inmate of his private prison.

Dad spent his days with his parents and nights in his own apartment paid for by disability income that was granted. Nonny and Nonna soon had him arrested and committed when he tried to throw my grandfather out a window. How quickly people own-up to reality when suddenly they become the endangered.

Despite all this, his parents fed him, tried to nurture him, and now– far too late– gingerly treated him like the child that I should have been if life was “normal” when he wasn’t otherwise incarcerated by family, police, or– in those too rare instants of lucidity– his own will.

I suppose that Nonny and Nonna cared for me as best they could, feeding me and paying my grade-school and high-school tuition, (because they insisted I go to Catholic school). This small recompense was only the tip of what was owed to my mother and I after all of the unnecessary emotional, physical, and financial hardships we had endured. Of course, Mom did forgo a big cash bonus when Nonny offered her a few thousand dollars and a one-way ticket home to Switzerland if she left me behind. She turned and walked away from him again: Another sidewalk hustle gone bust.

I therefore had little respite from my Dad or his parents. With Mom working and me in elementary school I was still too young to remain in our apartment alone. My grandparents’ became a place for me to wait and complete homework with Dad to keep me company until I was old enough to gladly become a latch-key kid. I continued to put on a happy, fat face while stuffing junk-food into my mouth and reading my books because of avoidance or a continuing acceptance of “my usual.”

Around the time I was ten, Dad entered the faceless legions of the homeless. Though he had his own apartment and lacked for nothing in the way of bare necessities, he simply chose to leave it behind and Nonny maintained the rent on his unit.

But, still, he couldn’t be avoided. One day, as I walked with my grade-school friends to the City Hall area to sell chocolate for the school’s fundraiser, I saw him sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramp. Though I tried to bypass him, he spotted me and called me over. I awkwardly went and asked “What’s going on?” with the traffic zoom and horns from the ramp above us muddling our brief talk. He said, “Nothing much,” and introduced me to two “friends” who had empty beer bottles at their feet. We exchanged other niceties– “How is school, son?” “Fine, Dad.”– until I walked away, head down-turned. My friends did not need to ask who he was, nor would they.

Then we received word that he was in Arizona, living in a Salvation Army house. To this day we have no idea how he got there. The rare postcard was all the reminder of him we had, and this was enough. My grandfather sent money toward his upkeep with the proviso that we be informed immediately if he left the house or returned to New York.

About a year later, he returned. No notice from Arizona, instead we got a call from the NYPD. He had been living in a flophouse somewhere and got into an argument with the manager, threatening to kill him. The police broke into his room and found a .38 revolver hid under his pillow. Rikers Island prison became his new home and I shudder to think what might have happened had he not been captured and instead immediately returned to our lives. He was placed into a residential, non-voluntary treatment program where he spent all of two months before being released with, again, no mandatory follow-up. I was now twelve.

At age thirteen, during a Sunday morning breakfast visit to our apartment that had become semi-routine during his “good” periods, he suddenly rose and lunged at my mother, teeth bared. 

I quickly stood up between them, fists locked and cocked though I had never been in a fight, and uttered a loud “No!” He smirked and said something like, “Oh… you have your own private bodyguard now, Amalia!” before storming out of the apartment. I had to become like a newborn, old-school Batman rising to protect the threatened.

By the time I was fourteen, he suffered a major relapse and became prone to disappearing for hours at a time or even whole days. I came home from high school one afternoon to find him pacing up and down the block across from his parents’ building. He had apparently been doing this most of the day, as per Señor Robles– the barber whose shop was across from our two buildings.

Part of me was glad to see him given his occasional disappearances and my frustrated internal care and love. Another part of me thought, “This is new. What the Hell is happening now?!”

No attempt had been made to retrieve him even though I knew his parents routinely looked out onto the street from their front windows as an ad hoc “neighborhood watch.” He and I exchanged greetings but other than that I did not push my luck. I was old enough to realize that this was a sensitive situation. I kept silent company, pacing alongside.

I finally asked him what was wrong after deciding that he seemed comfortable enough to discuss it. “They’re trying to poison me!” he said with ashen face and scorched eyes. I calmly told him that it just couldn’t be so, that he needed to eat, while trying not to appear judgmental. I eventually persuaded him to cross the street to their stoop. Here he froze. He could not, would not, proceed up into the entry-way.

“Everything will be alright, Dad. I’ll taste your food first.” With that assurance he walked the steps into the building and took the long walk up the three steep flights leading to my grandparents’ apartment.

He stopped many times along the way, eyes tearing with fear, and always I held and led him by the hand like a daycare worker with a naughty child. When we reached their floor, he paused again. With panic in his eyes and voice he tried to turn back, almost begging me to let him go. I stopped him. “I’ll protect you. Let’s go in.” We entered the apartment to their apparent surprise at seeing him because somehow, that day, they had not been on watch duty.

In that three-room railroad flat we sat staring at each other in the kitchen, our hands clasped, with the sick-canary yellow of the walls reflecting that late afternoon’s sunlight but adding little color to his own pale face. The sound of the trains rumbling by on the Manhattan Bridge added to the clamor of the household as his parents scrambled to prepare a meal, with Dad scowling at their every movement.

Once, he got up to use the toilet and I followed him out to the hallway where it was located, (the building so old that there used to be only one toilet per floor), and waited for him to emerge so he wouldn’t make a run. He was a little calmer. He methodically washed his hands in the apartment’s sink.

Then the food was served.

Nonna could not really cook well. “Al Dente” might have been an opera singer for all she knew. “The food’s good. Why don’t you have some?”

I stayed with Dad and ate both for and with him.

Afterwards, we took our long walk down those dingy, steep, marble stairs as I escorted him back to his apartment. “I need you to promise you will stay-in tonight and try to get some rest, okay? Promise?” He nodded. “We’ll see each other tomorrow and will speak more. I’ll cook for you if you need me to.”

With him “safely” in his apartment, I left and rode the elevator down. I slowly walked into nearby Seward Park and planted myself on a bench by its library– formerly a refuge for reading– to recover and try to process what I just had to do, and why. Tears came instead, rare ones through these many difficult times: A beleaguered version of The Spectre, super-heroic spirit of justice and mercy, exhausted from his mission.

During a later period of extended stability for him– during which time I worked to pay for and graduated college, fell in love, and got engaged– he showered my fiancé with adoration and called her “Princess.” She loved him back as he toured her around the Lower East Side showing her all the best food stores places and telling her the history of the community. The now-shuttered Gertel’s kosher bakery allowed him to buy her many a challah for her to “try,” actually to practically inhale… my kind of woman.

He was then the Best Man at our wedding where a great time was had by all, though I did have to remind Mom to spend some time with and dance with Dad rather than just hold court, (to be fair, she had so few chances in life to shine). Mom was not a dancer, though she did so this once for me, and when Dad afterwards took the hand of my mother-in-law for a twirl she thought he was just being polite. She was so quickly stunned by his grace and agility that she still speaks of it to this day. When Dad was good, he was good.

Less than a year after my marriage, now at age twenty-nine as I completed my graduate degree and was about to begin my chosen vocation as a teacher of English, he was gone. By his own hands. In a very brutal and public way. And I saw it coming via a creeping silence that engulfed him, his hunched and awkward body language, and the perpetual shadows on his handsome face.

I went over to his apartment on his birthday to share Chinese food and real talk. I told him I loved and cared for him. “Dad, I’m worried for you. There’s a darkness surrounding you I don’t like and I don’t understand.” He muttered a simple “I’m fine.” I said, “No, you’re not. Tell you what: If you’re willing to go right now, I’ll escort you to Bellevue and wait with you until they have you under observation.” He still denied any problem, but did not respond with anger, and neither did he eat any of the Chinese food he otherwise always relished. I hugged him and trundled out of the apartment.

I left full of despair but determined to keep trying. I went to the only two people who might help: My mother and my aunt. I explained the situation and my worries. Both of them told me that this was “normal,” that he “spiraled up-and-down but would come up again.” I strongly repeated that something felt different this time but, in the end, the two adults who might have been of most help did not offer any.

Mere weeks later, a Saturday morning call to me from a doctor at Beekman Downtown Hospital announced the “Urgent need to come in immediately,” giving the cryptic response to my questions that “There is a problem with his blood.” Yes, most of it had run out of his cross-cut wrists as Dad sat against a column in the lobby of his apartment building while maniacally laughing.

After speaking in-person with the doctors, from a payphone I made the first of the two most difficult phone calls of my life; first, to Mom, who I gently informed of Dad’s passing to her shocked wails as I assured her that I would handle all the legwork before coming over as quickly as possible, then a call to my deeply religious aunt who could not initially accept the reality of her brother’s death in such a manner. She stuttered, through tears, “What are you telling me?!”

My wife and I visited the City Medical Examiner’s Office to identify his body. They don’t slide it out of a bin like on TV, all you get is a Polaroid handed to you by a man in a yellow smock.

When we got to Mom’s, she had the pull-out couch ready. I collapsed onto it and trembled like a baby. Both of them huddled around to console me, but I pushed them away so I could briefly release years of pain and frustration and, now, mourning in solitude: A wannabe hero flinging-off his cape. I gathered myself together within fifteen minutes to begin all the work that was ahead, including handling all the burial details and Surrogate Court legal business on my own as Dad left no will and I would not pay a lawyer to handle his business. More avoidance of pain by distraction.

I did empathize with ninety-two-year-old Nonny, who lost Nonna two years prior and now violently lost his son. A half-hour before the first Wake, he bellowed at the funeral director when he saw “suicide” as the cause of death on the Death Certificate, screaming “I told you I did not want that there!” Nonny did not realize his orders meant nothing to the Medical Examiner.

Weeks after Dad’s burial, my mother told me she went into his apartment to scrub the blood from the floors and the walls… all the while talking to him and asking, “Why, Carlo, why?! We were here for you if you let us!”  I was angry that she did this instead of hiring a specialized cleaning crew, which was on my lengthy To Do List, but she insisted it was something she had to do. She and I were cut from the same tattered cloth except, perhaps, for her it was therapeutic. Keep calm(ish) and carry on.

I was immediately aware that Dad would never see the man and teacher and husband and caregiver to Mom I was to fully become. Neither would he know that we all returned to Switzerland and visited family numerous times in Mom’s elder years and that I eventually became a Swiss citizen with my official registration in that village I loved so much. The City and The Alps, finally reconciled. I learned enough German t communicate well– if not grammatically perfect– and resurrected one of my dead languages. The memories of the love and care of Bab and Tatta, and that of my Mom and wife, were enmeshed with a still-growing comprehension of what Dad went through in his torment despite his love for me and how this all impacted me as a child and adult.

It was not my overall helplessness during our lives together or having to identify his body that dominated my mind in the aftermath years. I realized that the slow walk up and down those long stairs fifteen years earlier marked the final exit from any semblance of childhood and his later suicide scarred the true beginnings of my adulthood. Bookends of life I do not wish on anyone.

I buried most of these feelings for twenty-plus years and focused intently on my work as a teacher and advisor to the detriment of most friendships, my health, and more quality time with my beloved. I sometimes think my students knew me best for all I emotionally invested. There were many welcome laughs with them, and I felt needed and was willing– maybe too willing– to give and give of myself while trying to be Superman for everyone except myself. My over-eating continued until I grew to close to 400 pounds.

I finally sought the counseling I needed all along to even begin to release the guilt, pain, anger, forever lost opportunities with Dad, and to embrace the love and esteem I did indeed hold in my heart for him… realizing that he felt the same for me all along through the fog of his illness.

I had my own long walk up to complete, and I am still climbing it.

I remember it was cold. The skies were a cool grey with that look of, “it might snow, it might not,” as I stood in front of the two-story, X-shaped building. I had been here several times before, visiting family and friends or going with my dad to take communion with fellow church members. The old two-story hospital, replaced in the late ‘90s by the shiny, off-white, eight-story Medical Center, still looked the same, down to the color of the brick. I opened the door and entered the familiar lobby. The high ceilings and large, two-story windows at the entrance of what used to be the waiting room were still there. The lobby was quiet and sterile, with a single receptionist at a desk that bore the name of one of the leading companies in the healthcare information technology industry. It was January 11, 2010, and I was there for the first day of my first job in the IT field. I was filled with nervous excitement. I was changing careers at (what I thought was a geriatric) 37 years old. Sitting in a cavernous space behind the main entrance of the building with multiple rows of grey fabric cubicles offset by a different shade of grey carpet, I began to meet my coworkers and learn about the job of supporting customers in the use of an application that our company developed to assist with the registration and billing of patients in a hospital setting.

During my time of work for the company, I experienced different life events, but the most significant event, to that point, came when we brought our son home at the end of 2019. My wife and I got married in 2009. We were both in our mid-to-late thirties. After about six or seven years of being unsuccessful at having children, doctors told us that we would most likely not be able to have children on our own. After careful consideration and prayer, we decided, in 2017, to consider adoption to grow our family. After waiting with an adoption agency for two years without being matched, we decided, in 2019, to consider fostering, and hopefully adopting a child from the foster care system. We started the foster care classes with AGAPE Nashville in mid-summer of 2019; at the end of summer, just a few days after we got approval from the state to be a foster home, our case worker reached out to us and told us that there was a child born in July who would most likely become adoptable very soon. She also told us they had us in mind for this child the entire time we went through our classes, but couldn’t say anything to us. After changing direction and being open to being foster parents, we were able to bring our son home just a few months after he had been born.

I took parental leave from work starting on January 1, 2020, to bond with our new addition. This new life, with his adorable little fat rolls, covered everything he touched with his slobber. It was a joyous time bonding with the chubby, smiling, “drool machine” who was learning to hold his head up; was fascinated by the lights and sounds of his toys; and loved to annoy Linus, an aging brindle colored Beagle-Bassett mix we had adopted from a rescue. These were times of laughter, sleepless nights, and dirty diapers. Spoons transformed into cargo planes that delivered food as they were on their final approach. I knew everything would change when I returned to work. And boy, how everything did change.

I had only been back at work for a week when management announced, “Everyone is going to work from home for two weeks”. COVID-19 had stopped the world, putting up a giant, “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign in flashing neon. Part of me was happy to work from home since my wife was still on maternity leave and we had our son at home. However, I soon learned this was the beginning of my house arrest. For three months, I had laughed and played with the chubby, smiling “drool machine” in the upstairs Bonus Room. Now, I was confined within the four beige walls of the adjacent room. I missed seeing my co-workers and interacting with them face-to-face. I have always been a person who craves personal interaction. But this was only for two weeks, right?  And it provided more time to spend with our son, whose adoption we were able to finalize the week before Thanksgiving, 2020.

It was a mild day on January 4, 2021, when our company CEO made the announcement, via email, to all employees. The company was closing all offices worldwide, and everyone would work from home going forward. There goes the face-to-face interaction with my coworkers over the low walls of our cubicles covered in grey fabric. There goes the decompression time during a 30-45-minute drive home (depending on traffic), listening to talk radio or my favorite songs. I was stuck at home even after the world turned on the “We’re Open” sign. My wife returned to her office, and our son entered preschool. The house was quiet; the room’s beige walls got closer daily. The only sounds were of the robotic vacuum we called Smithers, breaking the silence every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as it tried to consume a child’s sock and iPhone charging cables. I started to lose excitement about this job.

I took some days off work in January of 2023. My dad was in and out of the hospital. He had dealt with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder for quite a while after years of smoking. He had given up cigarettes several years prior. But after you smoke for nearly fifty years, well, it takes a toll. Beginning on New Year’s Day, he had been admitted to (the now not-so-shiny and off-white) Medical Center with fluid build-up around his lungs and heart. They drew off the fluid and sent him home. A week later, he was back in the hospital. His mother died from congestive heart failure, so I had seen this routine before. He was sent home on palliative care. The third and final time he was admitted, I drove him to the hospital along with my mother. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, so I was already off work. The overcrowded waiting room of the ER was stifling. People were sitting wherever they could find a spot. My mom and I took turns going back to see my dad. She returned to the waiting room, so I went to the triage area to see my dad. In the cold triage room, he told me, “Once I get outta here, I ain’t comin’ back”. One thing about my dad: He always kept his promises. He was sent home to hospice. Two days later, he passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, in his favorite sagging, brown recliner that sat in front of the large picture window of the house he had shared with my mother since 1965 (the same house I was raised in). They were married for 71 years. Dad died on January 27, 2023, at the age of 92. We laid him in the ground on January 31 as snow fell softly from the grey sky.  I remember it was cold.

I would say that the fallout from COVID-19 that created my imaginary prison made me start to dislike my job, but it was the death of my father that started making me consider what else I would want to do instead. While helping plan my dad’s funeral and meeting with the people at the funeral home, I thought that might be a job that I would like to do. My friends have said I have great empathy and a soothing demeanor. But I never thought about quitting my job to pursue a different career. Not at my age. Who would hire a 51-year-old with no experience as a funeral director?  But then, sometimes, God will give you a little nudge. Sometimes, He pushes you off the cliff.

The morning of January 24, 2025, started just like any other. I begrudgingly turned on the company laptop in the beige, upstairs compartment that served as my home office. Two accent lamps combined their efforts to provide the warmest and most welcoming light possible from a soft-white LED bulb. I went down to the kitchen to get some coffee, allowing the computer time to boot up, then returned with my cup of hot Death Wish Espresso Roast in hand. I sat down in my high-backed office chair with the scuffed arms from when I thought my desk was taller than it is, and logged in. Not long after, a message appears in Microsoft Teams,  “Do you have a minute?”  That’s never a good start to a message from your manager.

When my manager’s face appeared on the screen, she was visibly upset. I tried to add some levity to what I knew was coming. “I guess this is a bad time to ask for a raise”, I joked. She managed a smile. The company was downsizing our team; several of us would lose our jobs. That was my last day working for the company where I had worked for the past fifteen years. Ironically, I was having a new computer desk delivered to my house that day, a fact that, when stated, caused my manager to begin crying again. I turned off my computer, sat quietly, finished my cup of Death Wish coffee, and headed downstairs.

Many events shaping my life’s journey happen in January. I don’t know why, unless it’s because I don’t make resolutions each year, so the year decides to do it for me. I spent time thinking about what I wanted to do next. My wife and I told people I was looking for a new job. Most of the leads I got were for IT jobs, which makes sense after working in IT for fifteen years. None appealed to me, knowing how unhappy I had become in that line of work. Even my friends working in IT are dissatisfied and wish to quit their jobs. After some deep consideration and people continuing to send me IT job leads, I reached a decision. I told my wife, “I no longer want to work in IT. I want to be a funeral director.”  That night, she helped me look up everything you had to do to work in that industry. I talked to the funeral directors that I know at my church about it. I got my license to sell life insurance because (ironically enough) you can’t sell a pre-need funeral plan without a license to sell life insurance (I know, right?). We found a mortuary college in Nashville that’s been there since 1946, attended by almost every funeral director in Tennessee. I began the admissions process and was accepted for Fall 2025 enrollment.

So, now I find myself at a (not so geriatric) 53 years old; back in school and pursuing a career change. One that will provide the satisfaction of helping to bring comfort to families in a time of grief and the ability to help them honor and celebrate the life of their loved ones. Had it not been for the death of my father and losing a job I didn’t like, both events happening in January, I probably wouldn’t be making this change. And you probably wouldn’t be reading about it.

Why does everything happen in January?  The reality is that it doesn’t. My wife and I got married in June. We moved to our new home in April. Our son was born in July. My time working from home began in March. Our dog, Linus, passed away in September. Why, then, do the January moments seem to be more impactful?  Is it because life is returning to the ordinary after a time of thankfulness and celebration with family and friends during the holidays?  Is it because it’s winter?  Life, for the most part, is dormant in the winter. There is not as much light. The skies are grey, and the wind is bitter. It’s cold. I suppose the same can be said of an individual at times.

Perhaps, I will consider winter a necessary time of preparation for what is to come instead of a time of cold and bitter darkness. Spring comes, and thawing occurs. New growth emerges that will eventually be in full bloom. Flowers will display their colorful blossoms, adding their beauty to the landscape. Trees will grow outward and upward as they continue to strengthen and mature. Eventually, summer will provide bright sunshine and fresh air.  This, in time, leads to inevitable change and culminates in the harvest of autumn. I suppose the same can be said of an individual at times.

I will experience different moments that provide direction, and in some cases, redirection, at varying times. I must pay close attention to all of them, not just the ones that happen in January, as they are all life-shaping. I cannot determine or predict when things will happen. I’m okay if they come in January, but I would prefer if they occurred in July, maybe at the beach, when it’s not so cold.

Mom wasn’t made to be sick. She refused to stay at home, refused adaptive clothing, and refused to acknowledge when places weren’t accessible. She dawned chunky necklaces and oversized hoops (and when she did I’d say, the bigger the O the bigger the Ho, Mom), which I’m sure she laughed about when I wasn’t looking. She wore furry and frilled tops, and pants with so many buttons they were nearly impossible for a caregiver to configure. But they did it anyway.

She made those caregivers take her to TJ Maxx to buy ballgowns for black-tie weddings, and whatever other fashionable things called her name, even if they came with literal bells and whistles. I’ve never seen a woman wear so many formal outfits from a wheelchair while also dying. Being put together, head to toe, was non-negotiable, even if she was headed to get a pedicure. She would have despised what I wore to class in college: an oversized shirt that drooped past my knees. 

Showing up in the world as an aging pageant queen was her prerogative, and she mastered it, even if a disease was taking over her body. She typed out every detail of the outfit she wanted, down to the lipstick color. If my siblings, the caregivers, or I grabbed the Fushia Fusion instead of the Berry Rumba, she wasted precious energy typing the correction. I wanted to snap, “No one will notice, Mom.”

 But she would.

Mom expected the rest of us to perform alongside her as if it required no effort at all. Early on, when she first lost her ability to walk, she insisted on sitting on her walker, letting us roll her through places backwards, as if she could stand up and walk at any moment. Three years into the disease, she couldn’t move her legs, but she didn’t want others to know that.

Three years is the typical life expectancy after an ALS diagnosis, though my mother added twelve more. Fifteen years of witnessing her fight her body for her children, until she finally decided we’d be okay and she could leave us.

Some people wondered whether it had really been ALS and not another neurodegenerative disease, because no one lives that long with ALS, or so they’d say. But my father remembers February 2004 like it was yesterday. I’m sure Mom arrived at the doctor’s appointment in gold earrings with a matching gold necklace and her iconic gold bangles. 

         After the neurologist delivered the news, calling it Lou Gehrig’s disease, he glanced at the clock and said he had another appointment to scoot off to. Before leaving, he offered one suggestion: buy a wheelchair now with an oxygen tank attachment, because that would save them money in the future. Insurance would only cover one.

The doctor wished them well, and my parents never saw him again. It took years for my mother to succumb to a wheelchair, because where I came from, no prominent socialite used such a vessel for transportation, not even 90 year old grandmothers. Wheelchairs signaled weakness, and we were not weak.          

When she finally accepted that a wheelchair was the only acceptable form of transportation, life became easier in some ways. But the places she loved the most like her friends’ homes rarely had ramps, just muscular family friends willing to hoist her over wide front stoops with huge smiles. We barely make our home more accessible, so why would they?

I dreaded pulling up to these non handicap accessible venues. Mom wanted us to have a united front, smiling while heaving her out of the car to her wheelchair without sounding like we were at the gym. Once she was situated with the right amount of space between her back and the backrest and footplates reattached, the first obstacle stared us down: walkways lined with stepping stones and loose gravel. They were the hardest because every uneven slab poised an opportunity to catch the wheel of the wheelchair and catapult her forward.

Everyone offered to help, but we knew Mom wanted us to do it, not calling attention. She never asked us to stop bending over backwards so she could live life “normally,” so we forged ahead. My father lived with the motto, happy wife, happy life, and it trickled down to me. Happy mom, happy life.

So on went the chunky jewelry, the TJ Maxx runs, and the weekly nail appointments. I can’t imagine my daughters balancing that kind of devotion in the midst of my denial.

Pushing down frustration felt like holding a beach ball underwater. My godmother knew this, and always greeted me with a libation, because she could see deep down how much I was struggling with the constant acting. She’d wave her hands by my eyeballs so they would stop sweating. If she was hosting and couldn’t get to me right away, she’d summon my godsisters to take over and acknowledge my tears.

As I got older, everything we did started to feel unnecessary and harder to justify. Why couldn’t we be at home laughing over home videos of Beau and me running around with diapers on our heads wearing Mom’s bras? Those were the glimmers I desperately wanted. But when Mom didn’t give them, my siblings and I created them, like when we found alternative usages to the ramp in the garage. Once Mom went to bed, my little brother and his friends would signal it was time to meet up in the garage and create some high school ruckus. We threw makeshift skateboarding competitions like the show Jackass. My favorite memory of this was after my rehearsal dinner. We started going down the ramp headfirst, riding it like we were paddling out on surfboards, and then I stopped myself, because hobbling down the aisle the next day really would have irked my mother.  

I stopped acting during the summer between my first and second years of college. It happened after I drove her to the antique store to shop for a chest of drawers and end tables, despite having an already furnished bedroom from the previous tenant’s hand me downs. I didn’t need, or want, mahogany bedside tables, but I knew Mom wanted me to have some, so out of guilt I drove her alone to yet another inaccessible place.

I should have known how the trip would end: with my huffing and puffing just like leaving antique stores did as a little girl. The parking lot was gravel and the aisles were too narrow. After using every ounce of muscle I had to pull her out of the passenger seat and into her wheelchair that never unfolded easily, I finally had her ready, hoping it would bring her joy to discover a timeless, vintage piece for my first apartment. I just wanted her to feel included in the part of my life she couldn’t access. Even if that came as a burden to me.

But we didn’t find joy in faking normalcy this time. Instead, I parked her near the front and rushed through the store alone, without her keen eye to distinguish trash from treasure. We left empty-handed, and I decided that would be my last solo outing with her. I’m fairly certain we drove home with the trunk cocked open and the wheelchair jutting out, because I couldn’t collapse it properly to get the hatch closed. If we were going today, I’d put my foot down and say to Ikea we go, with ramps, elevators, wide aisles, and welcoming staff. We could have laughed at home while I tried to assemble it all and complained that half the screws seemed optional. But I wasn’t ready to let the facade go back then. It’s what I thought Mom wanted.

When the caregivers took over bringing her everywhere, especially to church, I stopped going with her. Wheeling her through the vestibule had become a spectacle, a weekly public display of Mom’s strength. She attended services while enduring kidney stones, which I have to believe she did for her own joy, not for the audience. Conversely, if I have a bad dream the night before, I skip church. Showing up amid the pain isn’t really my style.

But I am not my unshakably strong mother. And my father wasn’t either. Three years and one month after the diagnosis, Dad took off his wedding ring. When you think you’re on a three year timeline, you can go as hard as you can.

But no one accounts for overtime.