1978: An Ode To My Father

An Ode to My Father

January 9^th, 2020 marks the forty-first anniversary of my Father’s death. That year, 1978, was the year my life changed. Looking back over my life, the path I’d chosen prior to 1978 made little sense to anyone but the 20 year old me. I’ve never been one to choose or capitulate to the status quo definition of how one should live life. I’ve always chosen to go up what the majority of society, and African-American society in general considered to be the steepest and roughest side of the mountain. I did so not because I had something to prove. I did it because I wanted to experience life unconditionally and do so without owing a debt to anyone or anything that would cause me to compromise my will and self-determination. To put it where the goats can get to it and in my Mother’s own words, “I was a hardheaded motherfucker.”

The summer of 1978 is when everything changed for me. The Saturday before Father’s day that year, Dad came over to my apartment to visit. I didn’t know it at the time. But that would be the last day I would experience my Father’s infectious laughter and hear his truly side-splitting jokes and stories. My Dad was regal, He would hold court and have everyone and anyone from three to the age of ninety-nine hanging on his every word. But this day, there was something special about Dad. He was in rare form. He couldn’t miss. We laughed. We talked and we had a fellowship that day that was unlike any other prior to that moment. Dad stayed over my house for about three hours.

As he was leaving out the door, Dad turned around, walked towards me, embraced me tightly and told me he loved me. It wasn’t unusual for Dad to express his affection for me. But the intensity of his gesture towards me was greater this time. Later that day, I drove over to the house to see Mom and Dad. Dad wasn’t home and Mom told me he went to see my cousins in Oakland. When I arrived at the house, Mom had just finished cooking a big pot of gumbo. I fixed me a bowl or three of gumbo, talked with Mom for an hour or two and then went home.

About five-o’clock the next morning, the buzzer to my apartment rang. I really didn’t trip off of it. My apartment was the one and only party spot for all of my friends at that time. So, people coming over (as Moms would put it) “ ’fore day in the morning” wasn’t unusual. I pressed the buzzer and looked out of the door and down the stairs to see who it was. It was my cousin (Oakland's Triple OG), Norman Jefferies. I went back in the house and waited for him to come in. I was in the kitchen when he came through the door. When I turned around to greet him, I noticed the look on his face. I figured he had gotten into an argument with one of his females and needed to chill out at my crib until it blew over. I remember asking him what was up. He gave the bad news to me straight with no chaser. “Uncle Harold is in the hospital. He had a stroke. I asked him how bad is it?  “Cuz” he said. “It’s a damn stroke. I’m going back over to the hospital. I’ll see you there.” He left and I quickly got dressed and drove over to Herricks Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, CA.

I walked through ICU and to the room where Dad was being attended to. I expected the worse; tubes and needles everywhere in his body, oxygen masks, etc. But to my pleasant surprise, there was Dad laying in the bed, eyes bright and focused and when he saw me enter into the room he smiled at me as only a Dad could smile at his son. I walked over to him and he grabbed my hand and pulled me towards him. He tried to speak to me. But the stroke had left the right side of his body paralyzed and his words came out strained and unintelligible. Mom and I stayed with Dad that day until they kicked us out of ICU. When we left, I followed Mom to the house and sat with her for a while. She never once broke down or showed any weakness in her resolve to get through this moment. I followed her lead and did the same thing. Two years prior, Dad went through a triple-bypass. He came through that like a champ. I figured he would do the same thing this time too.  

After about two weeks, Dad's condition had stabilized and he was transferred to a rehabilitation facility in Hayward, CA. I would visit him daily and still being partially paralyzed and unable to do things on his own terms, I would help Dad with certain things he needed to get done. All I will say about one of those “certain things” is that I became fully aware of why Moms was smiling so much a day or two after he would return home from working on the train. I also understood for the first time in my life the underlying and most compelling reason why Dad would give me a few dollars and send me to Foster Freeze two blocks from our house in Berkeley to get a hamburger, fries and other snacks immediately after coming home after being gone for a week (or two) from working on the train and why Moms never protested when he did so. They wanted me out of the house so they could spend some quality time together as husband and wife. 

In July of that year, I received my acceptance letter from Morris Brown College in Atlanta. The day I received it, I rushed over to the rehabilitation facility to show Dad. I read it to him. He looked up at me and said as best as he could “I’m proud of you son.” He held my hand for an extended period and looked up to the ceiling and closed his eyes. I believe he was thanking God in prayer for allowing him to see the day his son would be going to college. I told Dad that I was thinking about not going and staying home to help take care of him. He immediately let go of my hand and grabbed my arm as hard as he could and shook me. He said “Go boy. Go!” He held onto my arm for a minute and looked through me as if he was trying to surreptitiously plant inside my mind the will to move on with my life and to allow him the right to meet his fate and his maker his way.

That August, the day before I was to leave to go to Atlanta, I drove to the rehabilitation facility to visit Dad. This would be the last time I would see him. He knew I was leaving to go to Atlanta the next day. I sat next to him as he sat in a wheelchair. He rubbed my cheek and forehead like he's done so many times before. He smiled at me as best as he could. I talked. He listened. Then, he turned his face from me and no matter how I tried or what I said, he never looked at me again. It was Dad’s way of telling me goodbye and that it was time for me to leave and become a man in my own right. At that moment, I got up out of the chair, kissed my Dad on his forehead and walked out of the room. The next day I was on my way to Atlanta. Dad passed away that following January while I was in Atlanta. That was 41 years ago. It’s still yesterday for me.