We Grieve Different:

Finding words to capture the complicated.
July 2024


   
      I get my name from my dad, Ronald Llewellyn Richardson. My older sister Rhonda, who was born ten months before me has the same name phonetically, though spelled La’Welyn. When I was younger and learned to write, I would put Jr., though I don’t carry the same last name. I stopped the same year after learning that you had to have the exact same name. I remember feeling a loss in not being a junior to a senior. My maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were junior and senior, both Tyree Jones.

    When we were growing up in Bay City, long after we separated from my dad, we would drive to Houston in search of my mom’s father. She had not seen him since she was a young girl, and we, her children, had never met him. We had only met one of our grandmother’s husbands when she lived in a trailer in some nondescript locale in Houston. I remember learning of his passing and subsequently learning that he was not my mom’s father.

    We were introduced to our great-grandfather who lived in Bay City, Texas, after we’d packed our things and left our dad in Houston. Bay City was a safe place for my mom, a place she was familiar with, having spent much of her childhood with her grandparents. He had a pink duplex that was a speakeasy on the bottom floor and a two-bedroom apartment upstairs. Shortly after we moved in, the downstairs was closed for business.

    I would spend a lot of my time with him. I would sit on the screened porch and watch the squirrels run around the trees, and him with his pellet gun shooting them so they wouldn’t eat all the raspberries. He had a garden that he would tend and sugar cane that grew within it. I remember needing a kind of attention that I couldn’t specify, but knew I could find in him. I also recall coming back one night and finding the spiraling red, blue, and white lights signifying an accident had happened; signifying his passing.

    It had to have been around this time that I went with my dad to see the monster trucks at the Astrodome. The loudspeakers, the dirt, salted peanuts, Big Foot and Gravedigger. I remember how long the walk down the spiraling ramp took when we left: forever. It was the only experience I remember having with my dad where we did something together that didn’t take place at one of his body shops or at a bar where I watched him play pool.

Periodically he would call me to see how I was doing, ask if I needed any money, or maybe let me know that there was $100 waiting for me at Western Union. There were times when I did not want to accept his money or his phone calls. Moments where I couldn’t escape a flashback of the abuse I watched my mother endure, fearing that my contact stood as a betrayal.

    I remember the running trope about absentee dads and growing up with kids that had never met their fathers. I would delve into myself and seek out any mundane occurrence, a snippet of normalcy in a childhood: a new bike, a big wheel, a Nintendo, Six Flags trips, playing the drums for the first time, the smell of bondo in the body shop, riding in his truck, his fingerless gloves with the exposed knuckles, watching Family Matters in the back of a limo he was hired to repair, eating Popeye’s chicken when the animated character was the mascot. But all those memories and experiences felt tainted by his actions and those he enabled in our lives.

    I remember being in fifth grade and writing out “I love my dab,” misspelling “dad,” because I was in a rush to put it to paper. It would later be an inside joke with myself. I think this was around the time we stopped going to Houston to see him, and instead bypassed that shop and went to see our aunts and grandmother instead.

Much like when I was young and sick, often left to remain in the hospital for days, if not weeks at a time, my dad did not come to see me when I was incarcerated. At some point blaming my mom for how I ended up in that situation, ironically dismissing his being the cause for the scenario. Yet, I still longed for the love of a father, even one with all the flaws he wore.

    The night before one of the many flights I would take back to California, I spoke to him on the phone. I believe my mom knew that I had not committed to returning to Texas, and I had not. During the call he told me that no one loves me more than my mom, which I heard as “your mom loves you more than I ever could.” Which then feels like, “the love you’re seeking in me is not available.”

    I stopped thinking about my dad. But, I would look in the mirror and see him. I would be reminded by family that I looked like him when I had an afro, and I could not tell if that was a good or a bad thing, or just a thing to say.

    In 2017, he had a stroke. At the time I worked at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. On my lunch breaks and after work, I would go to visit him. Inside I was still the little boy that longed to be around his dad, that loved the smell of bondo, that loved trying to recap movies to him and his friends. The little boy that wanted his dad, but also wanted his dad to be better.

    As he lay on what was to be his deathbed, I thought to myself, “Is this how I will look?” I thought about all the time we did not get to spend together, all the monster truck rallies we did not see, the conversations about his life, what he did all his life, and how I will never have a firsthand account of his experiences. I knew I missed him; he was going out the door, and I would be left with only the memories I have and those I could glean from others. Who he could have been in my life is lost to me.

    When he transitioned, I quickly found that grief, a grief of this kind, was one that I was alone in. I could not lean on anyone as the trauma caused during his life had created callouses and unhealed wounds and scabs. The little boy that held on for dear life to the small moments would not find comfort outside himself as this grief would need to be coped with differently.

    When we met my maternal grandfather, I remember being internally angry at him. I remember having been on my excursions through 3rd Ward and 5th Ward, the phone calls my mom would make to Majic 102 asking the DJs to play her message seeking her father and asking the public to help her in her quest. In meeting him, I wanted badly to dislike him, to make him deal with a bad attitude simply for being absent.

    All I knew of him was that he took very good care of himself and that he would wash his face with a steaming hot towel. The idea embedded itself in my head and I, too, began to place a hot, not steaming, towel on my face to rest before I cleaned my face in the morning. Subconsciously, I guess, I was looking for any trait, behavior, or mannerism that I could borrow to be closer to my male relations.

    For all the hate I wanted to heap atop him, I knew much of it was misplaced, aimed at my own want to have a relationship with my dad. I was jealous that he was able to come into our lives and that whatever he had done, wherever he had been, no longer mattered as this was a childhood desire of a little girl being met. I moved out of my own way and allowed myself to love a mystery that eluded us for so long.

    He was able to meet his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and now they have memories of him. They can claim ownership of the memories and experiences that they shared. He was able to see the life his daughter made, the home she bought, and the opportunities she provided her family in spite of so many points of adversity.

    When he transitioned, I could see how hard my mom took it. I could see in her the little girl that longed for and received the gift of reconciliation with her father. And now I see the little boy in me that was not afforded the same arc and immediately feel the weight of the irreconcilable.