"He did pass away." Pt. III

The thrilling conclusion of the 3-part series "He did pass away."  If it feels a little rushed that's because it is.  I just need to be done with it right now.   

Thursday morning my niece Jessica and I drove out to the house on Fell Road.  My father had literally been dying in there over the previous weekend and so there was an unpleasant odor throughout the house.  My brothers, brother-in-law, and nephews had already loaded up the mattress from his bed and the carpet from the bedroom and taken it away along with some of the other furniture.  The house had been disinfected days ago but the smell still lingered.  There were 13 adults moving around in this small one-story house so while it did take the majority of the day it really didn't take all that long to clean everything out.  Most of the things in the house were not worth much so a lot ended up being sent to the dump.  Dan, one of my nephews from Virginia, climbed up into the attic with me to bring down the few boxes that were still up there.  Most of my mother's glassware collection that had been up there was already gone, my sisters having taken it out last summer.

I don't know what they did with all of it, and I don't care, I was just glad it wasn't still there.  For some reason in her later life my mother became obsessed with collectible glass and then proceeded to buy so much of it, mostly at yard sales, that it filled the attic.  There were some xmas decorations and some boxes of my old toys.  Nothing good, a bunch of Cabbage Patch dolls and other junk toys that my 9-year-old niece Lexi and I dumped out on a bed in one of the spare rooms and went through.  I told her if there was anything she wanted she could take it.  She took a couple of things but we pretty much both decided that it looked like a bunch of trash and threw it away.  I generally am not one to be sentimental about objects but having said that I'm going to share an odd exception with you in a moment.  I ended up bagging up the Cabbage Patch and storing them in my sister's basement but when I looked at them again a couple weeks ago I told her I didn't want them and she could throw them out if she wanted.  

My family has never been wealthy, or even very financially comfortable.  Some of us live modestly out of necessity, some of us go the other direction people who were raised in a lower income family go and end up hoarding "treasures" from the dollar store.  But almost all of my siblings are tacky.  For some reason my taste in things tends to be a bit more...let's say, discerning, so some of the things my relatives were taking or deciding not to throw away were boggling my mind.  Near the end of the day I went into the bathroom and noticed that on the wall were these white plastic wall decorations (one of the things was holding fake flowers!) and a matching mirror.  I can't even find similar images of them online they're so tacky but let's say they were something akin to this:        

 

And these things had been hanging there since, like, we moved to that house in 1987.  So I grabbed all of these tacky monstrosities off the wall and shoved them in a trash bag and put it in the back of my brother's truck to be taken to the dump.  It was not the first time I had done that with something terribly ugly that day.  Later my sister asked me if I had taken, meaning to keep, the stuff off the bathroom wall and I just smiled and said, "Yup." 

I ended up with some useful things, like a paper shredder, a blood pressure machine thingy, a blender with a real glass container thingy, some other stuff... I claimed all the Pyrex bowls and quickly become annoyed when my oldest sister kept pointing out that they're "collectible."  Then there was the cast iron frying pan.  For years my sister Diane has had a claim on this frying pan which is really old and so it's well-seasoned, which is what you want in a cast iron pan.  Suddenly I was being asked if I wanted this frying pan, which I did, why not? but I was so perplexed by my sister suddenly not wanting something she had wanted so badly for years.  "I bought my own," was her response.  I brought my own as well, assuming I'd never see this one again.  And so it goes.  Now I have two.  Which I will rarely use.  

Speaking of lack of sentimentality: Much earlier in the day I had gone into the laundry room and found an old denim jacket that my father used to wear hanging on a hook next to his winter coat.  It's old and has paint spattered on it and what looks like dried blood in places and it's well-worn.  I found myself putting this jacket on and wearing it for the rest of the day.  I have it at home now and wear it out sometimes.  I find it hard to explain what attracted me to it in the first place or why I want to wear it.  I guess it's because even for all the pain he caused there were a few not so bad moments, too.  And he looked good in this jacket.  And after all, he used to be my daddy.  Listen to me, being a sentimental bastard.

A photo from the mid-80s in the kitchen of the Tony's Road house.

So the big deal of the night was that my father was buying us dinner.  Unfortunately it was at Shady Maple.  Prior to arriving I was super-stoked on going.  Even when I first got there I thought it was hilarious, probably because we were having a good time on the way.  Jessica was driving and I was in the passenger seat with Kenny and Brian in the back.  Brian was telling jokes and Kenny told a story about being arrested at the beach and we were all yelling about "Maple Shady!"  Chris refused to go even though it was free food.  Now I totally understand why.  He had been there before and believe me, once is enough for "Maple Shady."  You walk into this place and it's all fake fancy and huge, it's exactly like a casino except there are no table games or slot machines, just a buffet and a gift shop.  I made the joke but I'm not sure anyone in my family's ever been to a casino so it was greeted with silence.  We were escorted down this long hallway, all 19 of us, and given two tables in a banquet room.  The buffet is in its own huge room and runs for...a while (see the photos in the link) before it repeats on the other side.  It was awful.  There was this thing called "filling" which I kept being told was a bread stuffing but it just looked like a brown shape.  And there were the most massive fried chicken legs I've ever seen.  Then I watched in horror as almost every member of my family ate one of these genetically modified, hormone injected curiosities, including the small (the term is relative) children.  Even though I was eating meat at the time I just could not bring myself to touch those things!  They were that unnatural. 

After everyone had gorged themselves, myself included, we all had to wander around the gift shop downstairs for an interminable amount of time.  But that wasn't the end my friends!  No, there's another store to go to!  The Amish (Mennonite?) department store, Good's! which, whoo hoo, is open until 9!  So I guess that means we have to stay til 9?  It sure does!  (Was it only 9?  We must have gone to eat super early...)  At one point I looked around at those of us gathered out front waiting for the serious shoppers and saw Jessica, Kenny and Brian.  Holy Fuck, WHY ARE WE STILL HERE!  This is us!  We're not waiting for anyone!  Jessica, can we please go?!?!  No, we couldn't.  She wanted to say goodbye to my sister's family who were going back to Virginia the next day.  

Eventually we made it back home and to bed and the next day Chris drove me to the train station in Philly, almost taking the exit to the airport until I yelled, "No, TRAIN STATION!"  

I've pretty much come to the end of my story.  I've been dragging my feet on the ending most of the day because I just want to move on.  I will tell you that a disturbing side affect of this trip, and the one Allen and I made a couple weeks ago, has been that I think about moving back, a lot, not necessarily to Cecil County but at least in the general area.  This side of the state has yet to feel like home and I doubt it ever will.  And I'm jealous of what my family has, their jokes and their camaraderie, but I also know that it wouldn't be the same if I saw them every day.  It wouldn't be as funny.  I can see that from listening to the things Chris tells me, he's still too close to it.  I know that time and distance have changed the way I feel about my family and I am grateful for that because it allows me to love them better.  I guess the moral of this story is that [insert cliche about family]...       

By the way, when Allen and I were there last they asked if we wanted to have dinner at Maple Shady.  We declined.               

The quote that is the title of this 3 part series comes directly from the voice mail message Jessica left me when she called to tell me that my father had died. 

[Bonus Material: I asked Chris to sent me any thoughts he had regarding my behavior that week and this was his oddly flattering reply, I doubt I said anything even remotely this eloquent and I hope he won't mind that I'm allowing all of you to read this.]

What I remember most from January was your prediction about our family's behavior at the funeral.  You said that they wouldn't own up to the reality of your father's harsh behavior in the household - specifically his [...] toward your mother - and stated that you would prefer they accept that reality as to promote healing for a family without him rather than do the cutesy funeral thing as a rite of unfulfilled passage and perpetuation of a fairy tale as to fit the mould of some happy Norman Rockwell home.  Naturally, it all unfolded as you had divined.

I'm still glad he is dead but his ghost sort of just lingers in the periphery.

I also remember the funeral home.  You approached his casket and cried and shook like many normal people would.  You were one of the few who decided to grieve openly rather than pretend like everyone else.  One thing you kept saying was "He hurt mom."  Uncle David wanted to console you but he knew that he had accepted this a long time ago. [?]  There was a bit of bravery on his part.  It was eerily reminiscent of what had happened in 1993 just before you went to hospital. [Another story for another time, maybe.]