Grieving

A dream woke me up.

A picture my uncle took. I was six years old.

If he didn’t die I would have never come back here.

I’ve been grappling with that reality for a while now. Knowing that if my uncle hadn’t died on a cold December day, I wouldn’t be writing this from my apartment not far from where he lived for over thirty years.

Just seven months before he died, I cried in my Oakland living room, hoping my roommate didn’t decide to wake up early that day and head to the kitchen. In between tears, I kept listening for his door to open, in order to give myself the twenty seconds he had to pass my room and the bathroom, just enough time to wipe my face. If he had, he would have seen me silently crying, trying to not bring my baggage into the fun home we shared. He slept in that day.

Just the day before, I was in JFK begging the baggage agents to not charge me for all the books I had with me. They could sense there was more to the story, so they helped me out a bit. Thanking them profusely, I rushed to my gate so I could cry against the whites of the sky. You see, the day before that, I was dragging books from the Upper West Side to my best friend’s apartment in Bushwick. Books that I sent two friends to get from my mother’s storage unit in the Bronx. I officially had no real belongings of mine in the city I called my home for most of my life. But instead of letting all the things go, my mother held on to my books, despite her unwarranted comments and snipes about me not getting all my belongings when I moved out.

When I went through all she gave my friends, I knew she kept these things because she loved me. Because she knew what books meant to me, and so while I was grateful, I was tired of deciphering love through meanness and hardship. Hours later, I took the wicker chair I sat in as a child, where I hosted make believe talk shows mimicking Oprah and the daytime tv I saw, to a UPS in Soho. I told my mom many years earlier to save it for when I had children. At that UPS they told me it would cost me over two hundred dollars to ship the chair across the country.

“It’s light as a feather!” I exclaimed.

They explained that due to its odd shape and size it was an oversized parcel and it came with a large price tag. It’s expensive to have a difficult relationship with your family and I was paying the price in every way. So I went back to Brooklyn to pack all my books and resentment and it came spilling out of my bags in my Oakland apartment. I was mad at New York City. How dare it discard me like that, making me bring all of my prized possessions to a coast I knew I wouldn’t stay on forever. So even when I would muse about leaving Oakland, I’d look at places like D.C. or Atlanta. What about New York City, people would ask. Not yet I’d say, but really I wasn’t going back to a place that made me feel abandoned.

Yet when my uncle died, (and if you’ve followed my work, you know this part of the story already), I was forced back into the fold of my upbringing, my life, my home. I began to come home more because of him, to see my aunt (his wife), or hang out with my cousin (his stepson). My cousin would send me pictures he found of me and one my wounds of not being able to access childhood photos of myself was healed. When I came home I took pictures of the city. I also did this before he died, to remind myself that a place that caused me harm, also brought me so much joy.

My March trip of last year was the final pivot, the final push he gave me to try again. Sometimes on the phone he’d ask,

“When you visiting kid? I have something for you.”

Each visit after his death: his memorial, to spread his ashes in Prospect Park, to spend the anniversary of his death with my aunt and cousin, to spend time with my aunt. Each visit made me miss him badly, but healed me as well. I slept in beds I hadn’t slept in for years. I saw pictures I thought only my mother had and I didn’t have to resign myself to lost memories.

He had something for me each time I came home. Through missing him, I repaired my relationship with the city I have a fierce loyalty to. A place I’ve always wanted to make better, but couldn’t see beyond my own hurt to get there. It’s not that he wasn’t enough of a reason to bring me back prior to his death, it’s that his absence reminded me that I hadn’t been forgotten. It’s not a happy ending by any means, my aunt died four months after I moved home and I didn’t spend the holidays sitting around a table of my family members. It’s still disjointed and fractured and deeply painful. But I’m showing up.

This morning¹ I had a dream where my mother and I were running towards wherever my uncle was and I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to cry, knowing he was gone. As I cried in my dream, tears began falling and I woke up to a blurry room. The rest of the day I cried on and off, having not cried for my uncle in a long time. The tears were evidence of love felt, the grief is always evidence of what was lost.

Even though I know his death caused my return, I don’t regret not moving back before his death. He actually encouraged me to leave, saying,

“Hey kid who knows?! After Chicago you might go more west, maybe even to California!”

The last time I saw him, he told me he was going to come out west to visit me. I was excited and we said we’d plan something next year. It never happened, but I visit him all the time in my dreams, my thoughts, and my writing. I don’t know when it will stop feeling as hard, but if that’s the price I pay for having experienced him, I’ll pay it forever.

1. This was written on Sunday.