I went back home to Mississippi the week I turned forty-six. Rode back with my dad and stepmom when they came to visit Austin. Spent most of the time asleep in the backseat due to not taking my ADD meds. Woke up occasionally to see the trees change from cedar to pine, the landscape morphing from dry hot savannah to rolling plains and piney woods.
A lot has happened over the summer and going back to Mississippi, where the world is not as loud and everything moves slower, seemed like the best way to process it.
I’ve learned since getting engaged that I’m far more excited about being engaged than getting married. First of all, it’s expensive. Like, I get everyone must make a living, but holy shit. Secondly, every time I try to make a guest list, I realize that I know way too many people but have way too few friends.
But I am committed to getting married soonish even if we gotta do it at the Whataburger off I-35, me in the one dress that still fits me and Doug in one of his raggedy t-shirts with the holes under the armpits, while friends serve out French fries as hors d'oeuvres as the stereo system spits out whatever god awful audio vomit happens to be in the Top 20 that week.
My parents are getting older, you see, …and well, I think that’s what’s really been on my mind lately. Two years ago, I was learning calligraphy and I wrote, “My cat is dead and my kids are getting older” and stuck it on my fridge. Then I forgot about it until a friend came over and one saw it. “That’s the saddest thing that I’ve ever read,” he said.
If I still had my calligraphy pen today, I’d write, “My parents are getting older and my kids have flown the coop.”
My therapist says I’m transferring the grief over my empty nest to the perceived imminent loss of my parents, and she may be right, but she also hasn’t seen me repeat that same thing fifty times to my mother, who refuses to get a hearing aid, or watch my dad pass out the minute his jorts hit the couch (Dad: “Oh boy, what a day.” Me: “Dad, it’s ten in the morning.”)
My mom and I have talked about it, just because I’ve realized that both of them seem to be going to funerals every weekend. They announce their plans casually as if they were going to a Sunday matinee. (“Yeah, I gotta run by the bank and the post office then swing by Lakewood Funeral Home, do you need anything at Walgreens?”) It’s at the point where they know more people who are dead than alive, which is reassuring to my mother, who said, “If there’s an afterlife, I’m gonna have one helluva welcome party, and if there’s not, well I won’t know, will I? I’ll have ceased to exist.”
So I spent the next two weeks, when I wasn’t working, in bed or on the couch, at times at rest, other times crying. My parents kept asking if I wanted to go anywhere. I said no. I just wanted to be around them, even if we weren’t doing anything. Even when we weren’t in the same room. I wanted to wake up to the smell of my mother’s banana bread. Witness my dad and stepmom spend half an hour deciding what to watch on TV before passing out five minutes into their final decision. Listen as their four grandfather clocks chimed at the top of each hour, sounding off like an offkey orchestra. I wanted to stand outside my mother’s back porch after a rainy night and watch the hummingbirds at the feeder, the squirrels jumping from tree to tree, the cardinals fly in and out through the azaleas. I wanted the Natchez Trace to envelope me in its secrets, the magnolia trees to wrap their long branches around me, their fragrant blooms overtaking my senses, filling me with sweet nostalgia. When my parents pass, I will never return to Mississippi. All I have is what I had, the present already a memory.
But just because I won’t be going back to Mississippi doesn’t mean I’m staying in Texas. That, too, is coming to an end. It’s something that gives me hope while simultaneously crushing me.
Do we even exist when everyone we love is gone or going, and with them, the places that cradle you in their memories? These are the thoughts that I’m wrestling with on my 46th year around the sun.
