Entries Tagged 'Family' ↓

Two years ago on this date, my father passed. 

Dad, I love you and I miss you.  

Thanksgiving is just days away and while I’ve long since gotten over the whole Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock communing with benevolent, yet unsuspecting Native Americans story, I have always appreciated this holiday for the time I get to spend with family. It’s one of my favorite holidays actually, because it is less about crass commercialism (although the retailers have cleverly snagged the day after Thanksgiving as ‘Black Friday’) and more about people just coming together to enjoy each other’s company around a good meal. Like getting a special day off just to go out to dinner.

I’ll be heading “home” for the day. Despite being quite adult, thank you, my tiny apartment is just where I happen to live. Home is that place upstate where Mom still lives and where we all grew up. Another brother and his son, my nephew, will be there as well, along with my oldest brother, so there will be five for dinner. We were discussing the menu the other day during our weekly iChat and there will be several cooks in the kitchen.

While I’m home I’ll also get to do more work on a personal project I’ve undertaken. For the past three months I’ve been audio recording interviews with my mother, to gather family history and her personal stories about growing up, her immediate and extended family, living in the deep south during the depression and World War II, going off to college, meeting Dad, that kind of stuff.

In December 2005, my father died. About five months later, his younger brother and only remaining sibling passed. In September 2006, my mother’s younger brother died and then her mother passed last December. In August of this year, while I was on blog hiatus, we had a family reunion. I got to meet a lot of relatives I never knew before and see others I just haven’t seen in ages. Mom, at 82, is the second oldest member of the entire clan. This string of events made me realize that my access to information about my own family history currently resides in the mind of just one person and the clock is ticking. I’ve completely lost the ability to learn about my father’s side of the family since there are no more of his immediate family members alive.

It has been a fun and enlightening process that I highly recommend for anyone. I bought an iPod and a simple microphone that plugs into it, the iTalk, so I can then upload the audio and manipulate it in iTunes or burn a CD. I got the idea for this project from StoryCorps, although I’ve taken it a step further. We’ve done about three hours thus far and although they are relaxed and informal, I’ve tried to ask her about her life in a chronological order.

Mom doesn’t always want to answer every question and I often have to ask in more than one way to try to get more information out of her. What we might see as obstacles today–namely living in segregated New Orleans, Louisiana in the 1930′s–was no big deal as you hear her tell it. That was the way things were and you just worked around it. In some respects, it seems there was more of a sense of Black community then, because they had to do for themselves. Money was more likely to stay in the community as opposed to being spent in some large White business establishment.I have found out some surprising things too. My mother was in a girl singing group as a child, singing mostly spirituals. She displayed the meticulous and organized personality she would grow into very early on in life. And she didn’t take to my father initially, although apparently he liked her right from the start. He had to work on her. Their marriage lasted 56 years so he must have done something right.

Were it not for the very reason for the trip, it would have been a truly wonderful weekend.

I am finally beginning to recover physically from the whirlwind cross country journey out to Los Angeles and back last week for my grandmother�s funeral. While the trip itself was from December 28 � 31, the whole odyssey and the planning required to pull it off began on the 22nd when we learned of Gram�s passing. All through the Christmas holiday, small mountains had to be moved to find flights and hotels. In my immediate family alone there were six people traveling from five cities, all on the east coast. Among extended family also descended from Gram, there were another nine travelers from three east coast departure points.

My cousin Alesia in California pulled off the Herculean task of booking the accommodations. She�s not a professional travel agent but she certainly could be. She not only worked the web but worked the phones talking to her personal contacts at the airlines to negotiate the lowest possible fares, taking into consideration the short travel time, the bereavement allowance and our various starting points, date and time requirements. Wheelchair arrangements were also made for my mother at every point going and coming, and she pulled strings with friends at an LA area hotel to get us rooms that were not far from where family lives in Inglewood.

Tuesday after Christmas with the family, my younger brother and I had to travel back to Atlanta and New York City respectively to pack, take care of personal affairs, then fly out on Thursday. Two other brothers also departed that day, while Mom and my oldest brother left a day earlier.

Now I must tell you, I don�t travel well. I hate flying. I�m not afraid to fly, I just don�t care for it, especially when it�s such a long distance, you have to make connecting flights (I narrowly escaped being snowed-in in Denver during their most recent storm) and when there is such a short turnaround. Being cramped in those small seats, in that sealed capsule, with nowhere to go for six hours is hell on earth. It would have been far easier to pack me in dry ice and ship me FedEx. Add to that the fact that the four days spent out there wasn�t enough to adjust to the three hour time difference, so I was always going to bed at what would be the wee hours of the morning here in the east. I was a hair shy of punchy the entire time.

As funerals go, Gram�s home-going was a very lovely and respectful affair. She was quite a beloved member of her churches (plural, she belonged to one years ago, then moved to another) and ministers from both were represented. They spoke not in the general platitudes one gives to just any old deceased person, but with glowing and heartfelt comments of someone they genuinely knew and loved. Gram in many ways had raised them too. One younger minister told of how she had corrected him on some scripture passages and educated him about how things were done when he first arrived. It was interesting to hear comments from so many people who were not related but who also considered her like family.

Gram was a towering presence. She was the first in a long line of very dynamic women in our family, my mother, aunt and cousins, all carry on that trait, so much so that the entire ceremony was organized almost entirely by them. I had a hand in writing an early draft version of her obituary during Christmas that we emailed out, but by the time I arrived, and the programs were being created, it had been expanded to about three times its previous length. One of my older brothers helped in the design and layout, but other than that, most of the men in three families were simply left to do pall bearer duty.

Various grandchildren spoke during the funeral itself. Another of my brothers has become the designated speaker for our family on such occasions, the rest of us would turn into a blubbering mess, I�m afraid. He now calls himself �The Vice President,� the one assigned to speak at official functions.

Thankfully, we don�t have any �throw yourself on the casket� types in our family. Nobody fell out or had to be removed in hysterics or pulled focus away from the purpose at hand. It was all quite tasteful. Afterwards, at the repast in the church hall upstairs, I got to meet several family members I had previously never met before. It has been thirty years since my last trip out west and I have cousins who were teenagers then but who are now married adults with children I have only seen in photographs. It was a somber, yet friendly and relaxed atmosphere.

Finally, we had to make the long journey out to the cemetery. We were instantly reminded of how spread out the LA area is and how long it takes to get everywhere. The church was in Los Angeles, the burial site in Covina, which took us 45 minutes to an hour.

For those of you still shopping for a burial plot, let me make a suggestion. Keep your pall bearers in mind when you look at locations. Gram chose a truly beautiful site, with a lovely view�high up on a steep hill. There were eight pall bearers and every one of us, plus a cemetery official, was needed to safely carry her to her final resting spot. I should have worn turf shoes with cleats instead of Kenneth Cole. We worried my oldest brother was going to have a heart attack, his breathing was so heavy when we finally reached the top. But it was a lovely view. A lovely view.

We said our final goodbyes to Gram and even watched as her casket was lowered into the ground, although I�m not sure any of us were really prepared to see that. We made the long trip back to Inglewood, where everyone gathered for more eating and socializing. While the events of the day weighed heavy on our minds, they seemed secondary to the pleasure of each other�s company.

All of us admitted we hated the fact that it took a funeral to bring everyone together but we were still glad we were there. My late grandfather, Gram�s husband who died before I was born, had eight siblings. There were descendants from at least two other branches with whom I got to talk, exchange contact information and share stories. I learned for the first time how our great-grandfather escaped a slave plantation by outsmarting trackers out to recapture him.

Thanks to digital cameras and laptops, the memories were preserved as well. One cousin who is a photographer, had taken lots of pictures and dumped them to his PC and burned a CD. My brother then took his CD, dumped those pictures to his MacBook, added shots from his own camera, then created a slide show in iPhoto that everyone was able to watch. A day later he added some pictures I took and roughed out a DVD that we watched on a big screen tv. He�ll refine it and make copies for all of us.

There was a family reunion back in 2002 and plans for another in 2005 that failed to come off. So while some of us were out sightseeing Saturday, others were planning the next one, for July or August of this year in Atlanta. Spurred on by this recent set of circumstances and an awareness of a gradual transition on the genealogical chart, we came away from this week turning what could have been a negative experience into an opportunity grow closer. It is undoubtedly what Gram would have wanted.

I can�t say it was unexpected, because it wasn�t. The timing just sucks.

My grandmother�my mother�s mother�died this morning around 5:00 a.m. Los Angeles time, where just a day ago, she had been moved from a medical facility to a hospice care facility. She was 98 and had been in a nursing home for the past three years.

I must confess I always had a love/hate relationship with �Gram.� It�s not that I didn�t love her or she me, it�s that she practiced tough love. She had hard and fast rules that were not meant to be broken and a singular view of how kids should be raised. She sometimes thought my parents let us get away with too much. When she would come to visit us periodically from California, we always knew we�d have to adjust to her way of doing things for as long as she stayed, which often seemed to be open-ended. If she called for you, yelling out your name, she didn�t want to hear �What� in response. She expected you to come, immediately. We learned early on, �A hard head makes for a soft behind.�

Fiercely religious and a member of the Church of Christ, she knew we were going to hell. We were the �wrong religion� as Roman Catholics. Her visits were always one more chance to try to convert us. It never worked on me.

But cantankerous as she could be, Gram was also a great role model for the independent woman. For as long as I�ve been alive, she has never worked, but always had money to do whatever she wanted to do. A widow since 1951 (I never knew my maternal grandfather) she traveled the world, either with church members, friends or even by herself, well into her 90�s. Around 30 years ago, she had a house built for her out in the middle of nowhere, it seemed, in Perris, California, and lived there by her self quite contentedly.

In the span of just over a year, my mother has lost my father, her husband of 56 years, her younger brother, my uncle, this past September, and now her mother, my last remaining grandparent. She doesn�t show it, but this has been quite tough on her. Just my aunt and her remain from that generation and this loss of my elders is taking a toll on my brothers, cousins and me as well. There is a profound awareness that the time we have left together is fleeting.

Right after Christmas, I�ll travel back to NYC, tie up some loose ends, pack and make my way with other family members out to Los Angeles for a funeral probably Friday.

I was in a drug store a week ago, buying a graduation card for my nephew. I noticed all of the father�s day cards and it suddenly hit me. I no longer have a father. I have no one to send a card to. I nearly lost it right there in the store.

It has been six months since Dad�s passing and while I think of him daily, the realization that he is no longer somewhere where I can talk to him or sit with him or see him smile hasn�t totally sunk in. He was always a presence in my life even when he wasn�t around so much so that I took it for granted he�d always be there.

Growing up, he was the typical male of his generation. Mom did most of the day-to-day parenting�cooking, cleaning, shopping, family bookkeeping and tending to the needs of her six sons, despite having a fulltime job herself�while he went to work, brought home a paycheck and pretty much pursued his own interests. In today�s eyes while that might seem like emotional distance, and to some degree it was, it was merely the rigid and all-too-limiting roles that men and women were locked into in those days. As I grew into adulthood and we related to one another as adults, he was able to be more expressive with his love and got more involved in our lives.

But for him, growing up poor and Black in Dallas, TX, during the Depression, the eldest of four kids, he was of that generation that expected little but achieved a lot through hard work, perseverance and making the most of every opportunity. When the nuns at his high school offered a scholarship in physical education to a Catholic university, he accepted it, not because that was what he wanted to study, but because that was the only way he was going to get to college.

When World War II broke out, despite the fact that the armed services were as segregated as the rest of American society, he and thousands of other Black men and women answered the call to serve. When it ended, and the government thanked servicemen by offering college scholarships through the G.I. Bill, he again took advantage of the opportunity and got his masters degree.

Those experiences laid the perfect foundation for his work running community centers in three cities, working as a school teacher and district administrator, serving on numerous boards and heading or founding countless volunteer organizations, building a respected position as a community leader.

We used to have a family expression, �They don�t make rules for Dad.� Not our dad. Signs that said, �Keep Out� or �Authorized Personnel Only� were meant for someone else. He didn�t ask permission to do things, he just did them. He didn�t spend time complaining about how life wasn�t fair or some �ism� was preventing him from getting ahead. He just quietly found a way around those obstacles.

I bear a slight resemblance to my father and share his vocal intonations and speech patterns. I have many of his mannerisms and some of his habits. Those are things I either inherited genetically or learned through imitation. But I also learned many things through observation, not the least of which is not to complain when faced with adversity. Just put your head down and keep plugging away and somehow you work your way though any problem. That�s what Dad would have done.

Considering that many of my peers grew up either not knowing their fathers or having strained relations with them, I am fortunate to have had mine alive for as long as I did. Continuing on without him, I am all the more appreciative for the time we shared.

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The photo above was probably taken around 1959 or 1960, at my oldest brother�s First Holy Communion. Dad is with my four older brothers (from right to left), Rupert III, Charles, Stanley and Gregory. If I was born by then, I was probably somewhere with Mom and a bottle of formula. Younger brother Neil was still two years away.