Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 440

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Thicker Than Water: A Memoir," by Kerry Washington.

Why was it that weekends at Nana Jackson’s felt like a world apart? Maybe because, dressed in old ball gowns, I traveled with the sun patch across the floor of the suburban New Jersey neocolonial and soaked in more light and luxe than my parents’ West Philadelphia apartment could ever offer. Delight and time, the wide-armed, fragrant mimosa to climb in summer, the fireplace to stoke in winter, and choices all the day long—“whatever your little heart desires.” 

Yes, yes, yes, I knew that I was being spoiled, that word that obsessed black grown-ups, and even kids. What could be worse than to be spoiled, ruined by indulgence, incapable of withstanding hardship as we had done and would do in future? We were brought up by hand as surely as Pip in Great Expectations, and much prouder of it than he. “You spoiled!” could get you a corrective beatdown. Fast. Besides, everybody needed to respect authority, learn limits, and above all, to know that older people valued you, that they loved your undeserving black behind enough to bring you back from wrong to right. I knew myself to be a wimp, a failure in the toughness category, which was why I went insane with terror at the sound of my mother coming for me, or my father reaching for the threatened, though seldom used, belt. If a kid down the street got a beating—and in our cheek-by-jowl row houses we heard each one—I’d be good for a month! 

So, believe you me, as my mother would say before administering some firm guidance by hand, I knew good and well that my whole Nana deal was off-the-charts spoiling. Which was why, with peers, I kept it to myself. What happened in West Collingswood stayed in West Collingswood. Nana’s weekend abundance did not feel unconditional, by any means. Our contract was that I would “occupy myself” while she got things done, and then she’d spoil me. But the time alone felt more like Sabbath, as if God visited me occasionally in those sun patches and let me curl up to Its presence.

And yet this person who provided kindness and delight to my sister and me was at the same time the woman of whom my father, her only child, once said, “She never loved me.” As I moved into adulthood, Nana showed me more sides of herself, enough so that I understood, even as I grieved, why she and my father, who had seemed inseparable, had stopped speaking. What was love among them or us? Had it ever been real? 

I’m writing to find out. I want not to forget, but to recall, how the end of my grandmother’s life pulled into focus her hundred and one years on earth, the part we shared as well as the earlier life she brought with her into ours. I want to keep company with other families who have lived through and are living in the intense and demanding time of hospice. We underwent a mash-up of fear and mortality—she was dying, then living again, then dying—and memory and love. 

Nana hinged angrily between ancestors coming close and descendants she was about to leave. Her story required me to learn more about the father she’d referred to with pride, but only glancingly, and it took me into the halls of Congress and the Jim Crow South he brought his family north to escape. It brought me closer to her son, my father, and drove me farther from him. Death up close and personal meant my husband and daughters, and my sister and her family, riding with Nana in family sidecars through her alt-universe of dreams and visions, and our own, through truth and lies, business and money, and communal and racial memory.

I do not know how long they were happy together. As early as I can remember, a leitmotif of tension played through our shiny clean apartment with its thrift-store books and good nutrition. Often anger. Sometimes rage. I loved them so much, and I was afraid of them, individually and together. It felt correct and also very wrong to learn that love and fear was also how I was to feel about God.

I told myself that this would be good for our daughter Zoë, who was still in middle school when Nana came. Our older daughter, Laura, had gone to Iowa with us when we helped my father-in-law at the end of his life. I told myself that death in the context of family, age, love, and care, rather than war and violence, was a fact of life that we should share with young people, or else how could they grow into their own stewardship of life?

Nana’s bedtime ritual lasted thirty minutes, unless some particular story had to be repeated. When the environment was juuuust right, as she used to say about Goldilocks and the porridge, she smiled and burrowed happily into the bedclothes and mommy blanket. We were taking such good care of her, she liked to say, she couldn’t die.