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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…
