Hand-Me-Downs
TL/DR: Inheriting stuff from your deceased parents is often overwhelming. On finding space in your heart for the constant reminders and the grief that follows...
As ever, the trains roll through the valley. The train that usually passes through at 4am is late this morning. I wonder what caused its lateness. And will that gum up the schedule for the rest of the day? I just don’t know how you manage that kind of thing.
The coffee maker I use was my father's. It's not a fancy coffee maker. It's a Mr. coffee. He had a spare when we moved from California back to Virginia. It was waiting for us in the little house we rented from them when we arrived. Covid had just shut down the country and they weren't supposed to be there when we arrived, but there was my father and my stepmother. And the coffee maker.
Every morning, I think about that. Every morning, I get up and remember their refusal to participate in Covid protocols. I remember how good it was to see them. I remember how frustrated I was to see them.
My father would pass away just a few weeks after we arrived. Congestive heart failure. He didn't want to go to the hospital because he didn't want to die there alone. So he died in his living room. He said he would. He said years before that we would be wheeling his body out of the house that he lived in for the last 30+ years of his life. And he did. And we did. In the deep of the night.
I have the coffee maker to prove it.
It's the day-to-day reminders that are actually our inheritance.
I love them. I can be sentimental. It's true. And it makes great coffee.
So when you hear about me drinking coffee in the morning…yes, I have a caffeine addiction. And my father still enables it. Ha!
That’s Monday morning.
Today, I have to work on my day off. Sometimes, that’s just how it goes. I have two morning meetings to attend. I worked over the weekend, otherwise I wouldn’t mind. Life as the head of Richmond Hill can be demanding. It’s a constant effort to maintain healthy boundaries and to get one’s work done at the same time.
Life is a series of memories, of recollections played out again and again. Life has an anamnetical quality to it. We recollect and make the past real again by reentering the moment. Every morning I reenter that arrival to Richmond and the kindness of my father and stepmother. Every morning I reenter my father’s death. I reenter my stepmother’s death just a year ago. This is what grief and love look like. They are always bound together…
…in hand-me-downs.
My dad is still alive, and this reminds me that I've been neglecting his memory even in my own life. It makes me a little ashamed, though it's a hard relationship. It'd be easier if he were either amazing or awful. In a sense he focused so hard on doing that he often forgot to be, and I think I have suffered for that as an adult. Additionally, I think I've followed in his footsteps until recently, and my relationships have suffered. But he is my dad and he is owed better than I have given. I wonder what I'll have of him after he's gone.
When my mom was still alive, she gave me a cutting from her jade plant, a descendant of a plant that my sister gave to her 30 years prior. Now, maybe 10 years later, I am still caring for that jade plant, and some cuttings have produced more plants. I think of my mom every time I see the plants, and I'm terrified that they will die because of my neglect or watering too much or something else. I don't have my mother's green thumb. But I have her memory and that remains alive in my heart.