Losing A Parent

 Losing A Parent

 

If you don’t do something stupid when you are young and remove yourself from the gene pool, you will outlive your parents.

Here in the Oedipal South, nobody seems to ever recover from the loss of a parent. 

 

 

My parents were good people. They were born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and grew up without a many possessions. They were were grateful for everything they had.

 

 

They started out life together as a young farmer and a young teacher, twenty-somethings who had an old house, a tractor Mother bought for Dad with one of her first teaching paychecks, a crazy female blue tick named Lady*, a few head of cattle, and a few chickens. Dad brought the cattle into the marriage with him, and Mamaw gave Mother the chickens.

 

 

Mother was going to school in the summer, riding to her classes at Murray State University with some other teachers who were attempting to get their master’s in education. Mother was a sophomore when they married.

 

It was not a shotgun wedding, not the usual type, but guns were involved, for it was during the Korean War; Dad would have gone to the war if Mother hadn’t married him. They had intended to wait until she got her degree. If they hadn’t gotten married he would have died with the platoon that perished in the Korean Alps for lack of alpine gear.

 

 

They had taken out a mortgage on the farm, which came with a house; it was not a great house, but it was a big house, a large, Edwardian house with a modest amount of gingerbreading on the front porch. They painted, papered, laid linoleum, turned on the lights and moved in.

 

 

The first summer was hot, Mother said, because she cooked on a wood stove. But the trees had branches that brushed the ground, so after the first rains in September, they were glad of a fire in the grate.

 

 

This was the house of my early childhood. The wood cookstove had been replaced by a gas cookstove when I came along ten years later, but we had an Ashley Warm-Morning Heater that they fed with ash logs and hard coal. In summer I swung on a swingset in the backyard, and talked to the sows as they lay in the mud just behind the backyard fence. They talked to me too, guttural talk, rather than gutter talk, and I think we both enjoyed our conversations.

 

 

When I was 4 years old they built a new house. I say “they built a new house” because they didn’t really talk about the house around me. I was a child, but I was an intelligent, observant child. The one thing I remember about the new house is once when Dad came home and told Mother that the new house nearly burned down. He came in and sat down at the dining table under the overhead light and put his head in his hands. Mother bent over him to ask him about the fire. He was so upset that he could not speak. He took everything seriously that he did, and wanted everything to be done properly. It had been an affront to his honor, I truly believe, and that he felt that he had let down everyone, including himself, by letting the unfinished structure catch fire. They had a mortgage on that house, and they would have had to have paid that mortgage and to live in a house that, even as we were living in it, was falling down. 

But he had put out the fire, and we moved into it. 

My brother came along. I started school. I’m going to not mention school, because it deserves its own rant/post. I’m going to move forward to today. 

What I wrote was background. I’m 56 years old, and most people, if I don’t tell them how old I am, think I’m 36. They know I can’t be a kid, because I talk about college and graduate school. College requires its own rant/post, so I won’t write about it. I’ll do it another time. 

My father died when I was 24 and he was 55. He had just turned 55; his 55th birthday was on January 27th and he died on February 12th. 

My mother died when she was 86. I was 52. She had been in decline for about ten years. I knew that it was a matter of time. We had had a very difficult relationship, because she was a Silent Generation member who wanted me to have absolute, bland same-sameyness my whole life, and for me to be absolutely passive, and to accept everything she said as the absolute truth, and to do everything she told me to do. We could possibly have more different, but I’m not sure how. 

It’s very different to lose a parent who you loved, but who you weren’t allowed to get to know very well, because you had another parent who wanted to absorb you or to eat you alive, and to lose the parent who wanted to eat you alive. Add in that the parent who you loved died at a very young age, and you have two different sets of circumstances.

I live in the South, which is Oedipal. Everyone here, if they are naya-tay-yay-uffs, wants to fuck his mother. If they don’t want to have sex with her, then they just want to become one with her, to merge totally in a union of the minds and spirits. It’s a really sick, twisted way of thinking. 

I think, truly, really-truly, that the reason why southerners go so baroquely insane in their fifties with some regularity, is because of this Oedipal fixation on their mothers, and that when they lose them, they lose the only real friend they have. Southerners, especially in Nashville and the Deep South, don’t have friends. They have marriages, affairs, and children, and then, later, grandchildren. I don’t see them enjoying their grandchildren that much. So when they lose their mothers, they lose the only real friend they have. 

It’s not like that in Kentucky. We mourn for our parents, and some of us grieve for years, but we just grieve for them because they’re gone, because they didn’t live long enough, like my poor father, because they had hard lives, because they didn’t get to have any fun, because they had to make do and do without, because they couldn’t achieve any of their dreams, but we have sense enough to know that they can’t come back and we don’t wish them back. I wish my dad, who loved watch movies on TV, could be here to watch Roku or Firestick, Hulu, YouTube, and all the billions of items on the greater Internet. He would have loved to have been able to watch a movie at any time of the day or night. 

My parents’ generation had circles of friends. Married people loved each other and they were attentive and dutiful to their parents and in-laws, but they had their friends to talk to and to hang out with; they had functions. They had someone besides their spouses and children to lean on, to communicate with. When they lost their parents they sighed, they cried, and they tended their graves. Death is inevitable. They knew this. The Baby Boom Generation and onward seem to have forgotten this. 

Where I am going with this is to suggest that we cultivate our circles of friends and not try to make our parents our only friends. It's hard enough to go through life as things are now, what with climate change and the pandemic. We should not make things harder by having no friends.