Lots of folks at Daily Kos are grieving every day.
Some are grieving recent deaths. Some are grieving deaths that happened around this time of year.
Some are grieving family and friends who died in uniform.
Still others are pre-grieving deaths expected to happen in the near future, or feeling the loss of loved ones to dementia.
Some are heartbroken at the loss of the unconditional love of a fur friend.
Some are having a birthday without Mom, a wedding without Dad, or another life milestone with a very important person missing.
Still others wake up every morning missing someone who died too young, or who died after many years of marriage, or who died after a lifetime of friendship.
Whatever your reason for grief is, you are welcome to share it here.
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Welcome, fellow travelers on the grief journey
and a special welcome to anyone new to The Grieving Room.
We meet on Monday evenings.
Whether your loss is recent, or many years ago;
whether you've lost a person, or a pet;
or even if the person you're "mourning" is still alive,
("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time),
you can come to this diary and say whatever you need to say.
We can't solve each other's problems,
but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Unlike a private journal
here, you know: your words are read by people who
have been through their own hell.
There's no need to pretty it up or tone it down..
It just is.
My grandfather died a long time ago. Even though I loved him with all my heart, I do not remember the exact day, or even the exact year. Come to think of it, maybe I have forgotten the date *because* he meant so much to me. I could go in the other room right now and look through mom’s old papers for the date, but I don’t want to.
All I remember is that he died during what was already a sad and depressing period in my life and the grief laid on top of it just added to my general melancholy. I was in college then, disappointed that he would not live to see me graduate, since he was so proud of my education. He rejoined my grandmother who predeceased him, and the two of them did so much to raise me that I actually felt I had lost my parents rather than my grandparents. But I do not remember mourning him or even crying at his funeral, in part because I wanted to hold it together for my mom’s sake. She actually HAD lost her parents, and she adored her father, and so I felt I had to be strong for her.
Most of the time I mourned for him over the years was in wishing I had gotten to know him better, wishing I had asked him more about the history he lived through, or crying over items of his that I wanted after he died that were disposed of in a way that upset me.
But on July 29 I felt his presence more strongly than I had felt it for years, and I cried for him, and mourned him for hours.
I was traveling by train from Boston to North Carolina. On Thursday I took the overnight train from Boston to DC, with a three hour layover at Union Station Friday morning, where I had to change trains for the southern leg of the trip.
At Union Station I needed to go to the drug store to get some personal care items I had not had the chance to buy before leaving Boston. But the drug store was on the lower level, and I had four pieces of luggage with me: one over my shoulder and two more heavy ones piled on top of a rolling bag that was not built to carry the load (the poor overloaded wheels began to splay outward).
The down escalator right by the store was not working, and I did not feel capable of carrying the bags down the stairs. So I walked to another elevator, but it said “this elevator does not go to lower level”. So I dragged all my bags to the Amtrak police desk and they directed me to an elevator all the way at the end of the station. After walking there and struggling through a crowd of commuters, I discovered that elevator only went to the subway. I dragged everything back to the police desk and they apologized for not being more specific. This time they directed me to the correct elevator, most of the way back the way I had just come, but turning left at the end of the walkway instead of right.
I sighed at the prospect of another long walk. I had slept very little on the overnight train, and had stayed up most of the night before that also, so I was exhausted, and I had already walked the entire length of Union Station three times, my arms and shoulders and back hurting more with each step. I stopped and looked at my pedometer. Over 3000 steps.
And suddenly the tears began to flow.
My grandfather worked as a porter in Union Station for decades. Not the kind who rode on the trains with the sleeper cars and put up with various indignities including being called out of their name (back in the day Pullman sleeping car porters were often called “George”, regardless of what their names really were, for the convenience of the passengers). No, he was one of the lower-status guys who just carried people’s bags from the train out to the taxi stand. He came home every night. But his tips were smaller.
I wept thinking of all the days and weeks and years of hard work he put in under this same high domed ceiling. I thought of him climbing up into and out of trains, and then carrying heavy suitcases from the tracks to the street, dozens of times a day. Sometimes a bag in each hand and another under each arm. Then putting the bags in the trunk of a Yellow Cab or Capitol Taxi and maybe getting a dime for his work. A dime.
But a nickel bought a loaf of bread then, and he had four children to feed. (This was before the minimum wage of 25 cents an hour was established in 1938.) A nickel bought flour enough to make more than one loaf of homemade bread. My grandmother always cooked from scratch to save money.
Sometimes he got nothing for his labor, from people who assumed his hourly pay from the railroad should be enough for the likes of him. I have no idea what he made an hour, but it wasn’t much. He was expected to live on tips.
Every now and then a generous businessman would give him a whole quarter.
My grandfather was a self-taught man who only had a few grades of formal education. Both his parents were slaves as children and therefore subject to the slave codes prohibiting slaves from being taught to read and write. They had been free for decades by the time he was born, but even though the laws were no longer on the books, prejudice and fear still kept lots of black folks from attaining literacy. He only completed the third grade, but this was back when completing grammar school gave you a decent basic education. At least he learned how to read and write before presumably dropping out of school to help the family by working as he was able.
He *loved* to read. He read all the time. It was one of his favorite leisure activities, after tinkering in his workshop and growing beautiful roses in the backyard. One of my earliest and strongest childhood memories is of watching him sit in his chair in the corner of his bedroom, smoking his pipe and reading. He was my first example of reading for pleasure. He luxuriated over reading the paper, and he liked to read the dictionary too. Later when I started reading encyclopedias everyone said it was in imitation of him.
He was also a fix-it man and could repair any broken thing with the tools in his basement workshop. He made his own knife sharpener from a large sandstone with a hole drilled in the middle, that he set on a wooden axle with a wooden handle that turned it.
One time he made a desk out of an old TV cabinet.
I still have that desk.
I lived with him for the first seven years of my life. Sometimes I would hear him come home in the wee small hours, after the late train from New York came in, when everyone else in my multi-generational childhood home was fast asleep. I would crawl out of the bed I shared with my mother and sneak down to the kitchen where he would be making himself a snack. Butter mixed with syrup and spread on crackers. Or sometimes if he was more hungry, he would make a big bowl of rice and add butter and sugar and evaporated milk to it. We would eat in silence. He was tired. I just wanted to be with him. “Big Daddy rice” is still my favorite comfort food.
He took the conductor’s test a few times and each time they told him he failed, but he also helped train other (white) men who took the test and passed. That’s what it was like in those days. He was probably called George by people who couldn’t distinguish him from the sleeper car porters. He was probably called worse.
But he was employed through the entire Great Depression, occasionally supplementing his income by working as a dishwasher, especially after my mom arrived in 1937. A surprise late in life baby in the heart of the Depression. Damn. But she always said she never went hungry and she never felt poor (even though they were), because her father always had a job. The railroad was one of the largest employers of black men at that time. So he put up with what he had to put up with, and he grew strong, carrying those bags and bringing home those nickels and dimes and quarters that my grandmother tracked to the penny in her household budget notebooks.
He retired in the mid 1960s with a tiny monthly pension. When he died I got a lump sum benefit of a few hundred dollars that I used to buy a piece of sound equipment for a band I was in at the time. Stupid me.
All of this came flooding back to me as I trudged across Union Station on that Friday morning with my entire body aching. “Help me, Big Daddy,” I whispered out loud through my tears. “Send me your strength from the other side. Help me carry these bags, just as you did for all those years for all those strangers.”
And in that moment I did feel a little stronger. I did feel him with me. I was still tired, but I was suddenly proud of myself for even being able to walk so far with the heavy bags. It was proof that my trips to the gym were working. A few years ago I could not have walked a small fraction of that distance without frequent breathless stops to rest and much worse back and leg pain. I decided I would think of it as my workout! Still crying, I did smile a little at the thought of how strong I had gotten.
After the urgent errand at the drug store was finally complete, there was only about an hour before my train was scheduled to leave. No time for breakfast, but I had brought food with me (one reason the bags were so heavy).
About this time I noticed I had accidentally left my glasses on the train—if it’s not one thing it’s another. So I dragged my bags to the customer service area, but now I had pride in each step, pride in my own strength and pride in my grandfather’s decades of honest labor in that beautiful old building.
I must have looked like death warmed over between the exhaustion and the crying because the customer service agent offered to help me carry my bags to the lost and found area. So I blurted out the whole story, that I wanted to carry the bags myself, because I was communing with the spirit of my grandfather who carried bags at Union Station for 40 years. She came from behind her window and took two of my bags anyway. I must have looked terrible.
Lost and Found turned out to be near the Red Cap station, and the Red Cap assumed I was there to have my bags taken to the train. He did not have to carry bags at all. He put them on a motorized cart and offered me the seat beside him. I can walk, I said. I can walk fast enough if you just take the bags. But he said if I rode with him or one of the other red caps I could get on the train right now--early boarding for passengers who need extra assistance.
I felt Big Daddy reach out to me again, telling me to ride with the Red Cap. Telling me it was okay, I had already proven my point and honored his memory.
So for once I let my grey hair circles get me a benefit usually reserved to seniors more senior than myself. The Red Cap drove me and my bags to the train and then carried my bags up onto the train. During the short ride I told the Red Cap the whole story too—about my grandfather’s decades of work at Union Station. He said, “oh, if he retired in the mid 60s I just missed him. I started working here in the early 70s.”
It had been more than 50 years since I had a Red Cap put my bags on a train.
I gave him five dollars.
Participating here is an act of trust between blogfriends who know each other, and between people who have never met.
We send our needs, our cries for help, our poems of loss and recovery, our honest emotions, out into the blogosphere.
We trust that someone reading our words has been in a similar place and truly understands.
We read without judgment and offer presence, not advice.
We trust that someone out there will offer a kind word and stand beside us as we rant and rage about the unfairness of it all.