A Portrait Of Grief As An Elderly Black Man

Less than 24 hours after I had placed my father on an airplane, I heard his raspy, exhausted voice over the telephone. It was besieged by pain and held hostage by fear. For the past two weeks, he had been separated from his wife of sixty years, and when he was finally reunited with her, he realized death had her in its grasp.

My brother, the oldest, the medical doctor (a board-certified internal medicine doctor specializing in geriatrics) and the favorite of our parents, called me to tell me about my mother. I had left our parents' home on Monday, and he had arrived on Thursday to take our mother home with him to his sprawling estate on a lake. He had purchased a house about two years ago equipped with a mother-in-law suite for our parents. He wanted them to come live with his family when they could no longer maintain their independence.

His voice was clinical; our mom was like one of the tens of thousands of patients he had seen professionally. He told me that our mother's prognosis was not good. Then he morphed back into my brother and her son, and he confided in me, his baby brother, that he had been crying because mom was at the end of her journey. I confessed that I had cried after seeing her and realizing that the end was near and that she would be going to Glory.

Father Time is an abusive and undefeated bastard.

This sadist had pummeled my mother for the better part of the last five decades. He allowed cancer to claim her left breast. Then he attacked her lungs — afflicted her with a disease with a funny name (sarcoidosis), but is proficient at killing black folk: Bernie Mac, Reggie White, and Bill Russell. When she did not yield, he went after her right knee and then her left knee. My mother still gathered the pieces of herself, put herself back together in the correct order, and stood tall.

Father Time is stubborn and methodical. He went for her back, but she was strong enough to carry this burden. She had carried our family when my father was forced into early retirement. She had been the cornerstone of this family, so she was used to the strain on her back.

He targeted her sleep, slowly sapping her boundless energy and reducing her to a mortal like me. No longer the goddess that soared above us, she was now just a regular person who walked among us. He took each of her teeth, stealing the smile that once brought comfort and joy to those lucky enough to feel the warmth it radiated.

This unrelenting psychopath had made it his mission to rob us of her. It had been gradual. But she was aware of her growing deficiencies. Her lack of recall was her first clue that something sinister was afoot.

She was aware of the rage gathering within her, which would erupt unannounced and unprovoked. She knew she was ceding her mind.

Finally, on the eve of her 88th birthday, this undefeated ghoul had stolen her mind. He had seen fit to rob her of her mental clarity and condemn her to an opaque and foggy existence. Plagued with a temper that she cannot explain and is powerless to control, she quit talking.

A shell of her former self — my mother, his wife.

I could hear the tears in his eyes and feel his voice cracking as the reality of the moment seized him by the throat: his bride was dying.

Sixty years of marriage, friendship, business, or any other relationship are lined with unresolved wounds that have been allowed to fester for decades. Minor slights are no longer minor slights but evidence of a pattern of neglect, abuse, disrespect, or unrequited love.

Restrained by decorum and other social mores, these slights, some imagined, some real, are banished from everyday conversation. The aggrieved is left to turn them over in their head and allow them to ferment into something that develops a depth that was previously unknown and unimagined. These minor infractions are stored in vats banished to the outer edge of our consciousness. They are to be forgiven or forgotten but not relitigated five, ten, twenty, thirty, or sixty years later, but that happens when the mind falls victim to the ravages of old age and other disorders.

My father now finds himself bombarded by a constant stream of infractions he committed during a lifetime of marriage. Like many bombing raids, these too occur in the middle of the night or the early hours of the day. My mother will wake him up from the dead of sleep to confront him about why he never did this or forgot to do that or why he failed to do this and never wanted to do that.

Just like the British civilians who were weary after spending night upon night in the Underground, he has emerged sleep-deprived and irritated. Unable to accept, the woman he married has been altered and no longer exists in the same vessel he has seen almost every day of his adult life.

I do not know if it is denial that has robbed him of his ability to comprehend that dementia has prevailed, and his wife, my mother, battled as hard as she could, but she is no longer fully with us. Dementia has won, but his wife, my mother, fought it and injured this demonic foe so much that its hold over her is not complete. There are glimmers of who she once was that can sometimes be summoned.

My mother had many jobs, but her favorite job was as an elementary school teacher in Compton, California, in the late sixties and early seventies. When she is sequestered away, locked in the prison of her own mind, she presents to the rest of the world as a teacher. Students surround her that only she can see. These children are an incorrigible group of rascals who try her patience but whom she loves unconditionally.

My daughter, a preteen, is the talisman used to channel his wife, my mother, out of her abyss and into our realm. My daughter is the familiar that allows her to be bound to this world and our reality. At these moments, we see the woman I have known my whole life emerge.

However, my daughter eventually leaves, my mom sinks back into the darkness, and my father allows himself to be pulled down with her.

He interpreted their wedding vows as "never let me go." Even to his detriment, he clings to a woman who no longer entirely exists in this world.

My father is grieving, and I adore him for this act of love that is an expression of love that has evolved from being active and intentional to a vigil of remembrance. His father passed before his mother. His grandfather passed before his grandmother. His father-in-law passed before his mother-in-law. All his brothers and brother-in-laws passed before their wives and his sisters.

All his male black friends died before the women in their lives died.

In his late 80s, he once again has to circumnavigate a new challenge: how does an elderly black man grieve a life of loss?

This is one of the pernicious evils of racism, forcing one man to be the first so many different times in his life. He was the first to attend integrated public schools in his life, the first to go to college in his family, the first to graduate college in this family, the first to go to the Air Force in his family, the first to obtain a passport, the first to live in a predominately white neighborhood, and the first to live this long in the history of my family.

My mother became too much for him to handle alone in Arizona, so in a moment of clarity, they decided to move closer to my brother—a decision borne of desperation. He gave up the comfort of routines that had soothed him for the past few years. He gave up the panacea of familiarity that he had established at the grocery stores, doctors' offices, banks, and post offices. He abandoned his freedom; he was confident and competent enough to drive during off-peak hours within a three-mile radius of his house.

My father made a Faustian bargain with the hope that his bride’s health and sanity would return, and instead, it quickly diminished.

The cruelty of the human condition can be found in a one-bedroom unit in an assisted living community at the edge of the suburbs in Minnesota. My father is alone. His depth of character will not allow him to leave my mother alone for any period, for I fear he thinks it might be her last moment alive, and he does not want her to die alone.

She is in hospice…a parade of people fills their unit throughout the day, disrupting the tedium and monotony that provides structure to their lives as they wait for Father Time to send the Reaper for my mother.

Perhaps the cruelty that my father suffered is that all of his lifelong friends and siblings are dead.

Each body of water he passes by is an old fishing hole that my play-uncle Vern and he would take our boat fishing early Saturday morning. Vern died more than a decade ago.

Every trip to the grocery store reminds him that he no longer has his 3000-square-foot house to store his bounty. Instead, he has 1100 square feet. The trip to the grocery store is a gentle reminder that he no longer owns a car, and he has convinced himself he is better off not driving. His former Saturday morning ritual of calling his older sisters and comparing what they had purchased at the grocery store stopped seven years ago when the last of his two sisters died.

He is grieving…and his wife, my mother, is still alive—plans they concocted for their retirement will remain unaccomplished. Dreams of seeing where I live will remain unfulfilled. The life they had created, defended, fought for, and achieved is now ending, and his partner cannot remember it with him.

The curse and blessing of a long life leaves my father isolated. He is displaced in time — a chrono-refugee. One of the last of his kind, a member of the Silent Generation. According to his team of doctors, my father is a paragon of health.

Yet, he is stricken with grief and lacks the language to articulate the emotional storms that have apprehended him. With no models or examples of other black men to rely upon, men who knew the pain and humiliation of segregation, men who fled their ancestorial lands because of unabated white racial terror, men who saw their careers stalled because of their race while watching mediocre white men promoted over them, men who had endured the indignation of hearing their father called boy by white folk and their mothers never referred to as Mrs.

These are my father’s peers; most can only be found in cemeteries.

My father is from an era that white men, who call themselves conservative, want to erase from our collective histories and pray that other white men, in the future, will bestow them with the same honor of concealing their hateful and heinous acts from the annals of history.

Endowed with a rare humility that was infused in him as his birthright of being a black man born in the South during Jim Crow, I study my father as he manages his grief. I listen to him as he unburdens himself and explains how he deals with all the violent storms that attempt to consume him. I search for pearls of wisdom. I listen as an obedient son should. I am present because these moments are fleeting and valuable.

In the last act of his life, my father might be teaching me one final lesson: how an elderly black man is supposed to grieve. I call this class A Portrait Of Grief As An Elderly Black Man.

This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.