Deadpool: On The One-Year Anniversary of Mom's Death

In the summer of 1979, I was finishing up what would turn out to be the best year of my K-12 education.  I was in 9th grade at a high school in Honolulu where everybody was smart, the classes were interesting, and the boys spoke to the girls as if we were the thinking people we are.  Kay’s best friend had told her “Come on down. It’s the New South!” She decided to move and take me with her.  She informed mom, who basically said okay.

I was shocked and disappointed, to say the least. I’d finally felt comfortable and accepted at school.  At no point did my mother ever ask me if I wanted to go because I would have told her NO, I didn’t want to. But I was 14 years old, it was the late 70s, and I wasn’t receiving messages that it was okay to speak up for myself. Besides, would she have even respected my wishes?  It was a perfect opportunity to have one less kid to raise, which she’d already stopped doing when I was 12.

Those two years in Hattiesburg were by far the most miserable of my upbringing, even more so than the years in Detroit, where I was a latchkey kid at 5 or 6, a pseudo parent at 8, and a victim of a handsy relative at 9-1/2. 

At 14, I was dealing with a heap of unprocessed trauma that I didn’t know was even there. I felt like I had to contain myself and not reveal my truth about, well, anything really.

Hattiesburg MS wasn’t as new and shiny as expected.  Within about two weeks of our arrival, my beloved grandfather Papa, my father’s father, died.

Papa was my favorite.  He was always happy to see his grandbaby, he smoked cigars inside his apartment as was the custom, and every time I went to visit him on the other side of Detroit, he let me pick out a special toy from a drawer that contained all sorts of treasures.  Most of us would call it a junk drawer, but I thought it was the most magical place on earth.

Every summer from the time I was about 5 until I was about 10 Papa took me to North Carolina to visit two of his sisters, Aunt Betty and Aunt Hattie.  We would board a Greyhound in Detroit and spend what felt like days on the bus, looking out the window, eating, sleeping, and stretching our legs at various bus stations.  Papa carried a pocket full of quarters that he would dole out to me by the 2s and 3s.  I was a pinball wizard back then, barely able to see over the glass when I was younger, but I could play for 15 or 20 minutes on two quarters.  Grown men would stop and watch me, commenting on my skill.  Even back then, I didn’t give them the time of day.  Papa would be nearby, watching and resting.  I’d come back exhausted, he'd pat his pocket, and the jingle of the coins would perk me up, sparking another round of pinball.

When I got the news, all the cliches applied: I felt like the bottom had dropped out from under me, I became an empty shell, something inside of me died, etc. I kept it to myself and navigated each day as best as I could.  I don’t remember telling my classmates or teachers.  Kay tried to comfort me but I had walled myself off emotionally and couldn’t accept her care.  I was unable to go to his funeral, to say goodbye, to see him one more time.  The last picture I have of him is in the hospital, holding on his lap the shirt I sewed for him.  He is smiling proudly.

It’s still hard to write about how I felt over the next two years, because how can you write about things you didn’t experience? I don’t have all the words to describe my feelings of anguish because I wasn’t having the feelings themselves. What I did know was I was in a circular state of shock, fear, hypervigilance, and longing.

In Hattiesburg I was lonely, undereducated, and because we didn’t have a car, I couldn’t learn how to drive and we didn’t go to many places. I was not part of the popular crowd.  I was often the only Black kid in my class and when I tried to tether myself to other Black students, they treated me like the weirdo I was.  At home, I spent a lot of time in my room in a small yellow concrete block in a project-like neighborhood that was supposed to house married students for the local university, but which Kay and I inhabited nevertheless.  I’d learned how to play an acoustic guitar Kay purchased for me at a garage sale, I’d wear literal rose-colored glasses, and I’d look out the window, imagining a better life.

Two years later in 1981, in the middle of what I thought was my junior year, I found out I was a senior.  It was because of that single-best year in 9th grade in Honolulu.  They awarded more credits because we took more classes and those credits wiped out almost an entire year of school in Hattiesburg.  I was graduating a year early and was elated!  We made hasty plans to exit that hellhole.

I had been forced to be estranged from my grandmother Anna, my father’s mother, because it was rumored that if she found out where I was living, she would come and take me back to Detroit.  I hadn’t seen her since I was 11 and I might have spoken to her once or twice but only before moving to Hattiesburg.  I remember writing her a letter that I had to send to my mother in Honolulu and then she put it in a new envelope and sent it to Detroit to conceal my whereabouts.  About three months before graduation I announced that I was calling her up.  Kay was afraid, but I was determined.

Grandma Anna was a beautiful, cantankerous, obstinate, divisive woman and I loved her to death.  She always had a Benson & Hedges 100 dangling from the corner of her lip while she canceled people she’d just got finished praising.  Her and Papa had divorced decades before, but they would often come get me together.  Grandma drove (Papa didn’t) like a maniac and she’d be up front yanking the wheel left and right, me sliding from one side of the car to the other, cursing out some evildoing neighbor who probably said “hi” one too many times, Papa starting most sentences with, “Now Anna….”

I called Grandma Anna.  She was so happy to hear from me!  She cried and I probably cried and we talked for a long time.  The next week I called her again and we made plans for her to come to my high school graduation.  I was overjoyed and so was she!  It felt great to know that she was going to be there.  I didn’t care if she took me away, I just wanted to see her.  But she wasn’t going to because she said she wasn’t and she was expressing a tenderness I’d never heard her have before.

About six weeks before I graduated, I got the news that Grandma Anna had died.  I was absolutely devastated and the new feelings I wasn’t going to have crowded in with the feelings I wasn’t having already.  I was unable to go to her funeral, to say goodbye, to see her one more time.  The last picture I have of her is at Aunt Hattie’s house in Durham.  She’s in a house dress, turning around to face the camera, and she’d cut her long long hair into a cute bob.  She’s smiling in a soft and open way.  

Ironically, my dad, who I hadn’t seen since I was single digits, made his trucking company reroute him through H’burg during that time and while he couldn’t be at my graduation, I got to see him about two weeks beforehand, for about two hours.  It helped assuage the emptiness and we mourned her death together.  My mother and my sister didn’t have the money to come.  None of my blood relatives were at my high school graduation, but at least Kay was.

After that, I lost track of my dad for about 15 years.  One day, my mother unearthed him easily.  He was living in Victorville CA.  I called him up, we talked, and I planned on visiting him.  I flew into Ontario CA, rented an Eclipse, and spent the weekend driving him around to run errands, watching his favorite porn from recliners on opposite sides of a pile of computer equipment, and letting him be a dad by trying to explain to me how to prepare a bowl of cereal.  No, nothing weird happened.  Stay with me.

“I’m gonna have some cereal.”

“Okay,” he said, springing into action, “Go over there and open the cupboard.”

“Dad, I know where the cereal is.”

“Get the cereal out the cupboard.”

“Dad, I–”

“Now get a bowl out the other cupboard.”

“I KNOW HOW–”

“Go get the milk out the fridge.”

Laughing to myself, I wait for the next instructions.

“Pour the cereal in the bowl.  Pour the milk on the cereal.  Now get a spoon out the drawer.  Now eat the cereal.”

We continued to talk on the phone but our conversations got fewer and further between.  In mid November of 2000, a drum beat started in my temples.  It said, “Call your dad.  Call your dad.  Call your dad.”  It stopped in early December without my really noticing.  On Monday December 4th I got a call from the coroner telling me he died.  I was unable to go to his funeral, to say goodbye, to see him one more time.  The last pictures I have of him are in Victorville in his senior living complex, shirt open to the sun, and leaning on a cane, smiling contentedly.

To say I still miss all three of them is one of the biggest understatements of my life.

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Today, it has been one year since my mother died.  

During the first year of COVID, I texted mom’s housemate and implored her that if mom died, she’d promise to call me before she called an ambulance so I could be there before they took her away.  I needed to see her body before it was gone forever, no matter what state it was in.  To not, I was sure, would send me into an irretrievable nervous breakdown.  So when I got the call last year from the care facility, I drove almost as fast as I could.  I would make it before they took her away or die trying, either a satisfactory outcome.

What Kyra, Yvea, and I thought was going to take 30 minutes or maybe an hour, took four hours for the transportation service to arrive so we got to sit with her body for those four hours.  When the driver arrived, we watched from the doorway as he struggled to orient her onto the gurney.  He zipped her up, wheeled her out, and I took a video as we entered daylight, went down the ramp, turned the corner, and headed toward the ambulance.  He slid her in the back, closed the doors, and we watched as he drove away.

Mom was not the hero.  She was narcissistic.  She was vindictive.  She’d held the same irrational grudge for the last 50+ years.  She gave me up at 12 and put my sister through hell after that.  She left a trail of financial wreckage across four states.  She left behind bills that I will not be cleaning up.  It took us 8 months to clear out her room because instead of continuing to pay a small amount of money each month for a life insurance policy, she let that lapse in favor of spending thousands of dollars at a home shopping site that likely preys on the elderly.  She’d filled her room from floor to ceiling and up to the door with stuff.

I could never get her to change her stories.  I wasn’t able to tell her most of mine.  By the time I was in a position to do repair with her, it was too late to recapture the parts of childhood I’d lost to her fleeting interests and flights of fancy.  Yes, she was also a sweet little old lady to many.  That’s true.  But my sister and I know a different truth.  We made the best of it.

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In 2016, the first Deadpool movie came out.  I went to see it and loved it.  It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.  The comedy, the irreverence, the fight scenes, and the storyline.  So when the second one came out in 2018, I was eager to go in a way that I don’t usually feel about movies.  Me and the then-polycule went together, which was extra special.  We were in the early stages of bonding and we all wanted to see it.  I was with women who loved action films so they tracked things in these movies I didn’t know about because they’d been watching Marvel for years.  

At the end of the movie, while the credits roll, Deadpool gets a repaired time machine gadget from another character.  He goes back to save his girlfriend from getting killed in the first movie.  He returns to shoo away an innocent character from a life of crime fighting that led shortly to his death.  He shoots himself as the first movie iteration of Deadpool, informing Wolverine that he is “just cleaning up the timelines.”  He puts a bullet in actor Ryan Reynolds’ (who plays Deadpool) head so he won’t take the role of Green Lantern.  The rest of the polycule was thrilled. 

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Being able to sit with mom’s body helped repair the gaping holes left by not being there when my grandfather died in 1979, my grandmother in 1981, and my dad in 2000.  These three deaths are wounds I’ve dealt with for most of my life, but which never seem to get any better.  I was unable to find their edges; I just existed in the middle of the ocean. Mom helped me finally put a soft boundary around the grief, even if it is only a beach shore that changes with the tide.

I got to study her in great detail and for long enough for my mind and body to slow down and begin to process what was happening before she was gone for good. I got to be physically close to her. I put my ear to her chest and heard nothing. I talked to her, held her bony but still-warm hand, hugged her to me, kissed her forehead. I smoothed down her hair as best as I could, and thought about putting the dentures back in her mouth and the fake turban on her head but I didn’t want to move or hurt her, even though she was dead. I took a lot of pictures.  Her body got colder and colder.  I cried every few minutes, replaying the last two months of her hospitalizations and what I could have done to “save her.”  I took home her hospital bracelet and other personal effects.  Her dentures are staring at me right now.

Mom was often a pain in the ass while she was living, but when I got to see her right after she died and have so much time with her before her body went away, her decaying presence had cleaned up the timelines.  Just like Deadpool.