I thought their bond was indestructible. Now I’m mourning people who are still alive.
By Allyson Hobbs
Dr. Hobbs is a professor at Stanford.
After 60 years, my parents’ marriage is ending. The house where I grew up — our sanctuary for 40 years — is falling apart and will be sold soon.
I won’t go back. I’ll remember my bright pink bedroom with curtains that my mom made from Benetton sheets. I’ll remember my dad putting up the volleyball net in the backyard, securing the swing set and carrying home kids who had taken hard falls on the Slip ’N Slide.
I wonder if my parents’ marriage would have survived if my sister Sharon hadn’t died from breast cancer at 31 in 1998. When a child dies before a parent, such a loss “defies the expected order of life events,” leading many people to “experience the event as a challenge to basic existential assumptions,” a 2010 study by the National Institutes of Health explained. The study found that 18 years after the death of a child, bereaved parents “were more likely to have experienced a depressive episode and marital disruption” than other parents.
After my sister’s death, there were an intolerable number of losses in our family — grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins — but somehow, my parents pulled through. They seemed to grow even closer as our once large family became smaller and summer family reunions petered out.
My sister died one year after my future husband and I graduated from college. Looking back, nine years after our divorce, I wonder, did we ever have a chance? Could a young relationship survive a tragedy like that? What 22-year-old is equipped to help when the pain is so searing and so deep?
Flooded by my own sorrow and heartbreak, I found solace in my parents’ marriage: They were unbroken; their bond was indestructible.
My parents told the same stories of growing up on the South Side of Chicago hundreds of times. They anticipated the punch lines of jokes that they already knew, sometimes bursting into laughter before the joke was complete. My mom would smile and slowly shake her head and my dad would chuckle fitfully as the words tumbled out. Long after I had fallen asleep, they would sit next to each other in recliners in front of the fireplace, drinking daiquiris and watching the latest family drama on HBO.
They seemed to relish sharing the smallest and most mundane moments of life: running errands to the grocery store, the post office, the mall. On road trips to see relatives in Chicago or to our favorite summer vacation spot, my dad would entertain himself by singing along — with the most exaggerated intonations — to the hits of the Commodores, the O’Jays and the Platters. As my mom, my sisters and I drifted off to sleep, he’d croon: “They said someday you’ll find/All who love are blind/Oh-oh when your heart’s on fire/You must realize/Smoke gets in your eyes.”
The spectacular collapse of my parents’ marriage has been too much for me. I am undone, untethered, dysfunctional. I am in a small boat, too fatigued to pick up an oar, lost at sea. The lighthouse that never failed to guide me home is now out of service.
I knew separate holidays would be unbearable, so I planned a holiday party that I rationalized as our family’s Christmas. I did what I had watched my mother do for years: I hung garlands and big red bows on every doorway. I bought a flocked Christmas tree, just like the ones that my grandmother chose when my father was growing up. I lined the house with outdoor lights and hired a musician to lead the group in caroling. Could a California Christmas with yards of garland, a lively rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and a signature Christmas cocktail substitute for our traditional New Jersey one? Of course not. I berate myself for such a naïve hope.
I am mourning a family and people who are still alive. This is a different type of grief. Its lacerations came without warning. I didn’t have the time or the instinct to soften or parry the blow.
I think of my friends whose parents divorced when they were children or teenagers. I am an adult. I don’t have to shuttle between two homes, I won’t have to endure remarriages, I don’t believe that I am at fault. I should be able to stanch the wound, but I can’t. I’m bleeding out.
Staggered by this nightmarish new reality, I am grasping for explanations for why my parents can no longer live together. Perhaps the accumulated years of grief after my sister’s death have finally become too much and this separation is the “marital disruption” that the N.I.H. study predicted.
Or, perhaps in their mid-80s — after all of the joys, the stories, the sorrows, after all of the life that they have lived together — my parents find this final act too frightening and too disorienting. Is it possible that it might be easier to live without each other by choice, to break that once indestructible bond now, rather than to wait until it is broken cruelly, against their will?
A few years ago, my mom began to have impossible expectations of my father. “Stop walking like an old man,” she scolded him. “I am an old man,” he replied with a laugh.
But my mother wasn’t joking. Her endless patience was wearing thin, her natural gentleness was hardening, and she seemed uncharacteristically annoyed. The man whom my mom had loved since she was a teenager was now slower, unsteady and aging.
My dad, for his part, winced when my mom couldn’t remember a name or asked the same question twice.
I’ve been perseverating over my parents’ mortality for years. It must be terrifying for them.
I cling to my sister and childhood friends who remember the past. They cry as if these were their own parents. I tell new friends, “I wish you could have known my parents before.” Look at these pictures — look at their high school prom picture — maybe you can understand. Listen to these stories, maybe you can imagine. Maybe you can picture a beautiful and perfect love that lasted 60 years.
When my mother left our house in New Jersey, my father made two playlists for her with their favorite songs. Many of the songs are from the road trip playlists. Once in a while, I hear her playing those songs and I wonder what she is thinking. If I close my eyes, I am back in the car, and my head is resting on one of my sisters’ shoulders. The car is cozy and my dad is singing again. This time, he is doing his best imitation of Sam Cooke: “It’s been too hard living, oh my/And I’m afraid to die/’Cause I don’t know what’s up there/Beyond the sky/It’s been a long, a long time coming/But I know a change is gonna come/Oh yes, it will.”
The marriage is over now. Another family will live in our house. Just because it is gone doesn’t mean that it never was.
Allyson Hobbs is an associate professor of history and director of African and African-American studies at Stanford.
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