Today was a long day. It began at 3:30 am in a hotel room near Orlando, me awake thinking about the goodbye I would be making today. Becky and I were on the road after breakfast, heading east to my home town to see my sister Jan and for me to say goodbye to the house that my parents bought new in 1958.
Jan is preparing to move south to live with her daughter, so this was my last chance to see the house and process my memories and do my own grief work within its walls. It was tough. I have hated that house for decades—all of my adult life and the years of my adolescence. My sister made it her own after my mother died in 1985, but the many bad memories for me linger like stale tobacco residue on the walls and ceilings.
My father wasn’t a nasty drunk, but he was still a drunk and that came with lots of associative baggage, much of it stored in that house on North Fernwood Drive. The most vivid memory of my childhood is of him passing out in our front yard, falling out of the lawn chair that he would sit in for hours, staring off into space, silently battling his demons in the fresh air. One day, he had fallen out of the chair and was lying in the middle of the grass when I got home from school. We always left him out there to sober up on his own, but about thirty minutes later, the whole cross country team, many of whom were my high school classmates, ran down our street on that day’s practice run. I don’t know how many, if any, noticed the drunk on the front lawn of the house with the fishtail palm in the front yard, nor do I know if anyone knew it was my house. None of that really mattered because the humiliation splashed over me regardless and has left me a little damp to this day.
My adult sons never got to meet their paternal parents—they died when I was in my 20s. They were in their forties when I unexpectedly came along—the product of too much to drink at a party. My sisters were more than a decade older and both out of the house when my father’s drinking went pro. I was the child left to co-dependently learn to hate and resent him alongside my mother, which was her way of coping with her own misery.
One of my sons asked me a few months ago, during a dinner conversation, if I had any good memories associated with my ancestral home (they have heard plenty of the bad ones). I had to think about it, but indeed there were (are) some I was able to pull off a dusty shelf and share. We lived in a jungle of sorts, with a massive live oak tree covering the whole front yard and shading most of the roof. There were palms, ferns and bromeliads everywhere, with Spanish moss dripping from the arms of the oak. At the end of our block was the Indian River, more accurately a long skinny lagoon with a rocky ledge (the town’s name is Rockledge). As a kid I loved riding my bike along what we called the “river road” and one positive childhood memory with my father is the two of us zigzagging along the road in his red 1962 VW Karmann Ghia. Even in my adolescence, my father was a different person on the road. We loved to travel and any road trip was a temporary reprieve from our dysfunctional norm (thus the genesis of my own wanderlust).
My wife Becky and I arrived late morning, took Jan to lunch, helped her decorate her Christmas tree for the last time in that space, then we got my California sister, Judy, on Facetime, and the three of us smudged the property with a sage stick we brought from Baltimore. The stick struggled to stay lit, which provided a mildly humorous distraction for the hard path we were walking in that brief time. We started in the yard, back to front, stepping past where my old fort was, under a Brazilian Peppertree, past the spot where my father had a hammock. We stepped over and around volunteer ferns and foliage that my sister had been losing the war with for a number of years.
Inside, we recalled with laughs the many bad meals our mother attempted to make good. Jello mutations were mentioned more than once. We smoked the hall, the bathrooms, each bedroom, the screened porch. Once done, my sister needed a rest, so I went back outside for a bit of a cry in solitude. I allowed myself to look past the bad and see anew the beauty of the jungle that was slowly encompassing the house. I pretended I was on a spiritual hike (of course, I already was), so I captured some photos to retain the beauty and repurpose the malaise. It worked.
I went inside and returned to my old bedroom one last time while my sister packed her suitcase in preparation for us heading to my niece’s next. I stepped into my bedroom, the room where I would go to sleep in the sweltering summer heat with a fan at the foot of the bed and a bowl of ice chips next to me to chew on to help me fall asleep, the same room where my mother had her stroke and last conscious memory, the room where I slept the next time I stayed overnight in that house, the room that was both a place of safety and comfort during my teenage years, but also a repository of all the reasons I needed that comfort.
Rather than hating the room in that moment, because of its attachment to that house and those memories, I overheard myself thanking it. Thanking it for protecting me. Thanking it for providing that sanctuary when I needed my own controllable space. Thanking it for the wall that held the shelves that were still there, 45 years since I installed them to hold my books and record player, items that provided cerebral escape when needed. Tears again emerged. I tried not to repress them but rather allow myself to feel them fully—not something I do well. It was the tears, of course, that provided the closure, and I was able to turn and walk away with a sense of peace that was far from redemptive and reconciling, but satisfying and sufficient.
My sisters and I have not been together in this house since my nephew died 14 years ago and we all three know that, with each passing year, it is more and more likely that we will not be in the same room again anywhere else until one of our own funerals brings us together. That is hard to face.
Jan will probably not be fully moved for a few more months and the house may not be on the market until spring, but a final chapter for me has drawn to a close. Back in a new hotel room hours later, writing this in order to get it out of my head and heart so I can find an easier path to sleep, I’m feeling the relief of never having to go back into that house again. This time, though, the relief isn’t from a place of resentment or regret or repression, but because I was able to give the house—and myself—the gift of a proper goodbye.
I chose to go back. I said goodbye. And rather than just walking away, I turned and closed the door.