The Long Goodbye

At the end of my last visit home, I got up ungodly early to drive down to the New Orleans airport.

Still dark.

The sky didn’t start getting light until I reached Lake Pontchartrain three hours later. So it was like I was creeping out in the cover of the night.

Street lights were trembling in the reservoir.

I wanted to turn on some music but was immediately paralyzed trying to choose just the right song to match the moment.

There was a good chance I had just seen my father for the last time.

He’s 94. He broke his hip a few years ago. In the back our minds, my siblings and I immediately wondered if the end was nigh just because that’s what happens when old people break a hip. But we accepted the narrative that replacement surgery and physical therapy would restore his ability to walk and take care of himself.

The physical therapy was excruciating. Turns out the doctors did a terrible job with the replacement. So he had surgery to fix that.

Along the way, he got pneumonia and infections over and over. Every few weeks, it seemed, I got a text from my sister: “Dad’s back in the hospital.” My brother and I would text about whether now was the time to rush down to be at Dad’s side for the very end. Was this it?

And if we didn’t act fast enough, would we be coming down for a funeral? Did I still fit in my old suit?

But then my sister would text: “Well, he’s out of the woods.”

Obviously, I needed to plan a trip. But I kept putting it off precisely because I knew that it would probably be the last time I saw him. That freaked me out so much that I let week after week pass without booking a flight.

And now I was driving out of town. Leaving him in that hospital where I watched him slowly, slowly, slowly inch his way from his bed to a chair with a walker, a ceaseless cough rattling his chest. His real name is Charles, but his family nicknamed him Mickey when he was born in 1930 because of the size of his ears. Now that he’s withering away, with his gaunt face, his ears look twice as big.

It felt so strange.  Just driving away.

I thought of those scenes in movies where someone runs along with the train as it pulls out of the station. A lover, a child or an old friend looks out of the window of the train. The train speeds up. The person on the platform runs faster, waving wildly, until the train leaves him behind.

What if the train didn’t speed up? It continues to creep along. The person on the platform can keep up quite casually. Strolling with his hands in his pockets and looking up sadly at the window. He reaches the end of the platform and jumps down into the gravel and keeps walking along the track.

Or maybe the train stops altogether due to some mechanical problem. The person in the train opens the window to talk to the loved one on the platform.

It’s very emotional at first.  Oh, I can’t believe I have to flee the oppressive regime on the train to Sevastopol.  My heart is breaking.

But the train just sits there. The two of you drift into small talk. So … what were you planning for the rest of the day without me? Oh, I thought I’d stop by that store to see if they’ve finished repairing the old cuckoo clock I dropped off last week. Huh. Oh, yeah, right, the clock. Yeah, you know, it’s probably not ready but I figured I’d check. Sure, sure, makes sense.

Finally, you both agree that it’s pointless for you to stand there indefinitely.

But you feel strange just walking away.  As you cross the bridge, you can see the train is still in the station.  Someone you love who is going away maybe forever is STILL right there.  But you’re heading to some old shop to check on a broken clock.

This was my father on that train. My father. Before I can come back for another visit, there’s a good chance he will leave this earthly plane. He’ll be gone forever. Yet I’m just driving away.

Looking at the lumps of trees against the stars, a gas station glowing at the intersection, I was also brooding about how I might be leaving my home town for the last time.  My default sense of place would cease to exist as a real geographical location.

As long as your parents are alive, on some level, you feel like you’re just away living in a dorm. Even in my forties, I felt like I could stuff my dirty laundry in a bag and go back to lounge on the sofa until I figured out what to do next with my life.

Didn’t I still feel this way, in striking distance of 60, right up until my father’s health took a dramatic downturn?

When I booked this trip, I just picked the best prices for the flight without thinking about when I would arrive.  Only when I was pulling into town did it occur to me that it was a weekday.  My sister would be at work for hours.  There was nowhere to go.

When my mother died of a sudden heart attack, my sister and Dad spent hours at the hospital. Eventually, all of the sorrowful details were settled and they could leave.  My sister says that they got in the car and didn’t know where to go.

I felt similarly gutted making the loop around the old downtown with its few toy skyscrapers and the big stadium. The coliseum’s gaudy red and yellow panels, that were once the backdrop for the state fair with its rusty spinning rides and fried elephant ears, had been replaced with tall austere windows.

I didn’t know where to go.

The traditional complaint about going back to your home town is how everything has changed so much that you don’t recognize anything.  But, especially when I got to North Jackson where I grew up, I was surprised by how much it felt like time hadn’t moved.  Sure, there are more buildings and new roads.  But it’s all the same. Cheap strip malls that weren’t meant to last 40 years are still there.  And bumping over the potholes down Ridgewood Road toward the Reservoir feels exactly the same.  If I saw my 20-year old face in the rearview mirror and remembered in a flash that it was literally still 1985, that 40 years in New York had all been a dream, I wouldn’t have been shocked.

I didn’t know where to go back then either.

I decided to drive over to my dad’s house. This was such an emotionally masochistic thing to do that it bordered on the comic. For a while there, as I said, we all shared the delusion that Dad’s physical therapy would restore his ability to go home, to go back to woodworking projects in his shop, back to living his life. That hope is now long gone. His grandsons emptied most of the furniture and tools into a U-Haul and drove north.

So here I was pulling into the driveway of the locked-up house Dad will never go back to because he’s now going to lie in a hospital bed for his short time left on earth.

I walked around outside looking at the dark windows.  It felt strange because, really, this was not “my” house.  Mom and Dad moved out to Madison after I was fully transplanted in New York. Nabokov describes the shock of seeing home movies filmed before he was born.  It’s a weird inversion of being dead.  He doesn’t exist, but here are his mother and father smiling and not missing him in the least. I visited this house in Madison plenty, but walking around it still made me feel like Nabokov.  Like a ghost.  This is where my parents lived after I left, after I ceased to exist.  This is the house where there was no me.

I sat in a chair by the front door and looked at the neighborhood. Not a soul in sight. The street still has a desolate look to my eye. In the Great White Flight of the 90s, developers just leveled the landscape to build houses as fast as they could. So the neighborhood still looks raw. Naked. It takes a long time to grow trees that arch over the streets and make it feel like multiple generations have lived and died there, that multiple generations have gone from throwing the winning pass at the homecoming game to expiring in peace in a nursing home.

It struck me that, if I really wanted to, I could move into this house.  It was paid off, right?  It’d be a free house.  What would my pension pay if I retired early?  Compared to New York, the cost of living is pretty low in Madison.  I could sit in this very chair all day instead of staring at spreadsheets high above Columbus Circle.

Of course, this was all only a mechanical exercise, just working out the fact that moving into this house might be technically possible.

But thinking about it realistically, with my dad gone, why would I move to Madison? My sister is here. That would be nice. But if she lived in Akron or Des Moines, would I move my whole family next door? Why Madison, Mississippi? The idea of moving there just for a free house is pretty random.

The instant my dad dies, Jackson/Madison will just become Akron or Des Moines, one of the hundreds of random small cities across America, with the same service roads leading you to the same mall with the same Applebee’s.  The mythical Jackson where I grew up, blackbirds eternally gurgling in a big oak tree, the sun setting behind the slow freight train, will be only the balloon following me as I struggle up the tall stairs to Columbus Circle in the drizzle.

Like I said, these melancholy broodings were making me a little fussy about picking the right music for my big, symbolic exit.

I turned off Old Canton Road onto the Natchez Trace, the last stretch of the parkway that would lead me to I-55.

This last leg of The Trace was the usual end to the long drive back from my grandmother’s house in Kosciusko. I think door-to-door the drive was only about 65 miles, but the parkway strictly enforced a 50 mph speed limit. My father would’ve driven only 50 regardless. All the way, his eagle eyes saw invisible deer, skunks, woodchucks, red-headed woodpeckers and hawks. The endless drive made it feel like we were going to a different time as much as to a different place. Indeed, some of the great uncles and great aunts fanning themselves on creaking porches were living representatives of the 19^thcentury. My father recalls hearing first hand stories from his grandfather about Yankee soldiers trotting into the yard to water their horses.

As we made the journey home, the sun sinking behind the trees and flickering shadows on my closed lids, the trip seemed even slower, as though we’d get the bends if we rose too fast to the surface of regular life. By the time we reached this last bit of the parkway, we were driving in the blurry blue gloaming. But I knew that we were almost home.

Now it was dark. Just the white lines.

In a mile or two, I’d get on the ramp to the highway. This would be like that moment when the plane leaves the runway. The facts don’t really change in those few seconds, the roar of the wheels abruptly stopping, that unmistakable sense of skimming over the air and lifting. You couldn’t change your mind about the journey any easier when the wheels were still on the ground rushing down the tarmac. Yet somehow it matters that you’re in the air. You’re flying!

And when I hit the ramp to I-55 and pushed down the gas, it would be a straight shot south at 85 mph, leaving Jackson, my childhood, my father, my past in the rearview mirror for good.

So … what music do I play?

Of course, I’m exaggerating the difficulty of this decision for dramatic effect.  I wasn’t sweating blood.

But I really did want to get the mood just right.

I was figuring it needed to be blues or country.  Something Southern.  Visiting home is always a ritual of surrendering to the fact that I’m Southern.  I always experience a great release when I cast aside my New York snobbery and admit who I am and where I came from.

Driving up from New Orleans after I arrived, I stopped in Amite.  My mother’s family was rooted in that whole area of Louisiana going back to the early 1800s.  I followed some men in camouflage packing open sidearms into a restaurant with a linoleum floors and a buffet and ate cornbread with sweat tea. 

Back on the highway north I found a good country station.  Alan Jackson was singing about driving his father’s boat:

It was just an old plywood boat
A ‘75 Johnson with an electric choke
A young boy, two hands on the wheel
I can’t replace the way it made me feel
…
Just a little lake across the Alabama line
But I was king of the ocean
When Daddy let me drive

As the subsequent verses describe the same thrill driving his father’s old truck and then … gulp … how maybe his daughters will have the same memory about his letting them drive a jeep in their field, there were tears rolling down my face.  The gentle green hills passed outside.  Yes, my father would sometimes let me hold the steering wheel as we crawled up the Natchez Trace.

So I guess I was trying to unlock more tears for the drive out.  I was looking to unburden myself of grief.  To let it flow out of me now that I was alone in the car and alone for many hours.

But my thumb typed some letters into the Spotify search window and a familiar 80s drum beat kicked in.

It’s time the tale were told
Of how you took a child
And you made him old

I selected The Smith without really thinking about it. I didn’t say to myself, “Ah … I will play The Smiths for this reason.” I was just driving along the Trace brooding about what music to choose, then suddenly The Smiths were playing.

So given the extreme symbolic nature of the situation, I assumed for a while that this unconscious, impulsive choice “said” something, that it “revealed” valuable self-knowledge. It’s hard to get farther away from Jackson’s wholesome celebration of fostering independence in children so that they never expect a government handout on the taxpayer’s dime than Morrissey crooning about wanting an illicit lover to slap him.

But after mulling on it for a while, I decided that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  Sometimes you just feel like listening to The Smiths.

So, really, all that playing The Smiths “revealed” was that … it was over.  My task was complete.  Now I was just listening to music in the car.

I suppose with an aging parent, as things draw out, and draw out, you work through the stages of grief in advance of their actual death.  My mother died so suddenly that I have never progressed beyond denial.  I’m assuming that I will remain in denial forever.

But with my father, I now see, I passed through each stage.

From the shock, we were all in denial after Dad broke his hip. We pictured him puttering around the old kitchen again.

Then anger caught me off guard. I was sitting on my back deck, puffing on my pipe and looking at my scruffy little Brooklyn yard. My brother called to talk about how overwhelmed he felt trying to clean out Dad’s house. Jolts of grief seizing him as he found one more little drawer full of random screws. His misery pissed me off. My brother didn’t need to be suffering this way. Suddenly I was ranting about how that mean old man drove us all away and now, what, NOW we’re all supposed to feel sad that he’s alone in a nursing home? The whole reason it’s hard for me to fly down is due to desperate choices I made trying to escape the suffocating world of Mississippi. I’m stuck on another planet because of HIM, because of HIS endless paranoia and bitterness towards the wide, wonderful world that I wanted to see.

I guess I went through the bargaining stage over the months I put off forcing myself to buy my plane tickets for a visit. Is he really in such bad shape? Aren’t we exaggerating things? He’s so stubborn. We’re making all of this fuss, then he’ll live to be 110.

Of course, this process finally left me in the bog of depression.  Riding my subway back and forth to work, feeling a thick, flat sense of disassociation with the lower Manhattan skyline in the distance outside the F train window.

Now … out of the blue … with the dance of my thumb over the phone … acceptance.

I zoomed down the ramp to the highway and shot down the familiar corridor from County Line Road to Lakeland Drive, a Lego jumble of strip malls to the left and to the right under pink parking lot lights.

Fifteen minutes with you
I wouldn’t say no

Acceptance.

At this moment, as I write, he’s still hanging on. Down in a nursing home in Kosciusko. When he first moved in, he sent me a photo of the parking lot outside his window. Beneath his irascible, country persona, he’s still an educated artist. He knew that he was capturing in a single image his last view of the world.

When I tell my sister that I’m trying to figure out when I can come for another visit, she is bluntly discouraging.  Don’t come.  Don’t bother.  He’s reached such an advanced state of deterioration that it is profoundly unpleasant.  Not how you want to remember him.

In fact, there’s a chance he wouldn’t even remember me.

So that train to Sevastopol is still there in the station. I could walk back across the bridge and find my father’s window on that train. But when I call up to him from the platform, he might think I’m just a stranger. And he will most likely do nothing but rant about the stuffiness of his cabin and the endless slights he’s suffered from the porter, to whom he would apply any number offensive slurs.

The last time I saw him was indeed our real “goodbye.” The bedding in the room was all white and the afternoon sun was blazing through the window on the pale walls. My father was in a good mood when I left him in that room full of light.