The Power of Presence

by Joy Thomas Moore

  But first I had to come to grips with my new normal, one that I’d never expected and—had it not been for the voice in my own ear—one that I might not have survived successfully.

  Letting Go of What Was Supposed to Be

  Open the window of your mind. Allow the fresh air, new lights and new truths to enter.

  —Amit Ray

  It was 1984, and I had settled the kids inside our powder-blue Honda Civic to make the familiar drive from our home in Takoma Park, Maryland, to the east side of the Bronx, where my parents bought a home once our dad left his pulpit full-time. North on Route I-95 to the New Jersey Turnpike, over the George Washington Bridge, and just off the Bronx River Parkway to our destination: a cheerful three-story red brick house where my parents, “Mama Win” and “Papa Jim,” as my children called them, were undoubtedly already peering out the front window, debating exactly when we would be pulling up.

  In the backseat, six-year-old Wes and his four-year-old sister, Shani, were comfortable with snacks, favorite books, and toys within easy reach. As I started the engine, I glanced over at their big sister Nikki, twelve, who was riding shotgun. She stared out the window, silently. This was unlike any other trip to see their grandparents, but only Nikki was old enough to realize this. We were moving, saying goodbye to our house in Maryland and letting go of the remnants of the wonderful life we had had there for five years with their father. We were headed back to my childhood home to start over.

  Nikki had been my partner through my first two marriages, one ended by choice, another by the death of my husband. She was two when I left her biological father, who abused pot and was becoming physically violent. Seven years later, it was nine-year-old Nikki who dialed 911 when my beloved second husband, Wes, collapsed on the second-floor landing. And it was Nikki who stood guard by the front door and escorted the paramedics inside. Hours later Nikki was old enough to fully understood what it meant when the emergency room doctor said, “He’s gone.”

  That day had shaken us all so deeply that I wondered how we would ever go forward. I’d lost the love of my life, and I was devastated. As the shock lifted, I felt the enormity of being a single mom: the definitiveness of my loneliness and the overwhelming sense of responsibility. My first experience of becoming a single mother had been so different from my second. The first time I was miserable in what was a sinking marriage, so I had saved my money and set out on my own with Nikki. I was terrified and sad, but also relieved during those first months on my own. This time my heart was shattered. I had no playbook for how to put the pieces back together again, no strategies directing me how the four of us would survive without our family’s quarterback. My heart was merely performing its biological function, keeping me alive. I went into autopilot, closing the door on my emotions so I could devote whatever motion remained to keeping the house solvent and in order, getting the kids ready for school, fed, and transported. I refused to turn inward, fearing I would be lost in some kind of abyss of despair. I did not want my mind to take me to feelings of terror and sadness, compounded by overwhelming grief and the magnitude of my responsibility with not one but three children dependent on me. I didn’t want to remain in that space, so I did what I could to ignore it.

  The nights were the hardest. I didn’t want to sleep in our attic bedroom alone. Every time I walked up those stairs, I pictured Wes on the landing, gasping, struggling, helpless, dying. I began to sleep on the brown leatherette sofa in the living room. At first, I told myself that from that perch I could more easily hear the kids yell out for me. When they clearly didn’t seek me out night after night, a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood gave me a new excuse to sleep there. The bad guys would have to get past me first. I elevated myself to a first responder, but the truth was that I was miserable, eating poorly, barely sleeping, and I couldn’t imagine being in the bedroom without my husband.

  Guilt is a cruel companion to grief. When I finally got myself to close my eyes at night, I was tormented by the image of Wes in the ER. I had been shocked to see the man who lay on the hospital bed. He’d left the house that morning with a fever and a sore throat, complaining that an aspirin had lodged in his throat. He drove himself to the hospital. A few hours later, he seemed drugged and limp, unable to hold up his head or form a sentence. At first the doctor’s solution had been for him to go home with a prescription for penicillin, to which Wes was allergic, as was clearly marked on his chart. After Wes died, the autopsy determined that he’d had a swiftly moving throat infection, acute epiglottitis, which if undetected can kill a person in a few hours because it cuts off the body’s air supply. Of course, only a skilled physician could have discovered this. Nevertheless, the “I should haves” were my constant interior refrain. I should never have let him go to the emergency room on his own. I should have found someone else to drop the kids off at school and childcare. For weeks, I couldn’t stop beating myself up. Whatever my heart had given to others throughout my life—empathy, forgiveness, compassion, or just the ability to listen with love—my mind forbade me to muster for myself.

  Outwardly, I put up an amazing front of efficiency and effortless coping for the sake of the kids. I refused to burden them with my guilt, my feeling of inadequacy and failure. Inwardly, though, my survivor’s guilt created a complete disregard for my own well-being, causing a twenty-pound weight loss, sleepless nights, and intermittent, uncontrollable crying. For weeks I refused to take a walk during the day, because the first time I did I saw an elderly couple walking down the street, arm in arm, and my tears flowed. That was supposed to have been us!

  It took time, and I’m not sure exactly when or how it happened, but one day I looked into the eyes of my three confused children and a light pierced the darkness. They needed me to be present in their lives—more present than I had ever been before, and certainly more present than I had been since Wes died. I said to myself that while I would never understand God’s choice to take Wes and leave me, the responsibility to raise the kids was now mine. I had to prepare myself to do that, and do it well. It was only when I was ready to become the parent that I knew I needed to be to raise my children that the voice of guilt began to soften, and I allowed myself to feel the full rawness of my broken heart. I felt the timing was right to stay put for a while, in the fear and grief; that somehow while I was vulnerable, I felt a little stronger. I began to see the direct link between the heart and the mind. What I was thinking about and tormenting myself with, causing literal physical pangs in my heart, caused my heart to feel weak—and my mind followed. It wasn’t a conscious decision, maybe more of an instinct, that allowed my grief to evolve into a different phase: letting go of what I assumed would always be.

  Our lives would never be the same without him, but we were safe and we still had each other. I just needed to figure out how to be a mother to them in a new way. I no longer had the luxury of saying, “We’ll talk about this when your dad gets home,” so we had to settle matters in the moment. I no longer had a co-signer on decisions I made regarding the kids, so I had to rely on past lessons to deliberate much more carefully. I wanted to feel confident that I was making decisions Wes and I would have made together. But most important, I had to make my heart take a step back so that my grief would not blind me to the deep sorrow the kids were harboring. They needed me more than ever, and the only way I could get up again, be a mother to them again, was to get back into my mind space, even though it hurt so much to be there. I wanted to put all that was human and maternal into my children—compassion, empathy, generosity, forgiveness, all of it. That is what helped me parent my children in a way that they could feel my presence and my own fight on their behalf, even when we were apart.

  I had to face the fact that our new normal was going to be very different. Most of our savings had been depleted by the funeral, the life insurance payments were dwindling quickly, and the freelance money I was bringing in was barely covering the mortgage. The reality was that even a full-time job wouldn’t be nearly enough
to support us. Our modest house suddenly seemed a luxury we couldn’t afford, especially if I was going to be present for my children the way I wanted to be, and I realized that I needed to accept that our path was going to diverge from the one that Wes and I had been on.

  Presence of Mind means being aware of what’s most important for the family and doing what it takes to make sure everybody’s on board. I was acutely aware that the odds were against my family. My mind was saying that a thirty-two-year-old black woman wasn’t likely to successfully support three children. I started a nightly ritual of looking back over the course of the day and deciding what decisions or actions were necessary and what could have waited or not happened at all; of assessing where the kids were in their healing journey and what I could do the next day to help them; and of searching my own heart to determine whether my actions lived up to the standards of excellence, patience, and caring that Wes and I had established together as family norms.

  Even my college education and two degrees, which set me apart from some other moms, wouldn’t ensure family-supporting wages. I’d probably have to get two or maybe even three jobs to make ends meet. And then there was the perennial question: If I wasn’t there at night, who would watch over the children? If we moved from our familiar neighborhood to a small apartment, and I found a way to work from home or accept government support, I could plant my five-foot-five-and-a-half self at the front door every night until Nikki, Shani, and Wes grew out of their young bodies. But without a father, I feared the forces of confusion and distraction in the neighborhood could still slip in the windows and jimmy the locks on the back porch.

  I kept hoping for a sign that would tell me what to do. One night I braved the stairs to our attic bedroom, turned on the light on the bedside table, and waited. I opened the door to Wes’s side of the closet. His shirts and jackets were still lined up neatly on the top row, just as he’d liked, with the matching slacks slotted precisely on the rack underneath. I stepped into the closet doorway and held the sleeve of his favorite sport coat, inhaling deeply. His scent was still there, and rather than grief, I felt a part of him was still with me. I asked him, “Wes, what would you do?” One evening, after finally settling the kids down to bed, the house was particularly quiet, even peaceful. When I prayed my nightly questions, I felt a familiar sweetness around me and a mental picture of my parents’ house in the Bronx appeared. I had an answer. I needed to go back to my childhood home. It felt like Wes had given me the push and permission to go.

  My parents had suggested I move back home shortly after Wes died, but I hadn’t seriously considered it. My heart was overshadowing my mind: I didn’t want to leave the home that Wes and I had made together. There was also my independence (the gift of ego given to me by my mind). If I moved back home, wasn’t I admitting defeat? I would be discarding the world of my own choosing to return to the one my parents had built. Standing in front of Wes’s closet that night, I realized I was clinging to the illusion of autonomy—it was stubbornness keeping us there, not good sense. Staying in our house was not giving me independence; it was creating more burden, more debt, and more worry about how much longer I could manage. Moving home would allow me to give my children a life more like the one Wes and I had envisioned. What was truly important, what was truly my top priority, was doing whatever it took to best provide for my children. And at that moment, the simple, sad truth was that the plan Wes and I had of raising them in this house together was no longer an option. I couldn’t be the family they needed or the mother I wanted to be, the mother who was present for them for their dance recitals and music lessons and swim classes, without Wes there to share the load. I needed a new blueprint for the new life that we had been thrown into, and as much as my heart didn’t want to accept the change, my mind was finally able to consider new options for how to live by my priorities. I was lucky to have parents who wanted us to live with them; who had the means, however modest, as well as the fullness of heart to take us all in.

  Author and spiritual teacher Allan Lokos explains, “To be mindful entails examining the path we are traveling and making choices that alleviate suffering and bring happiness to ourselves and those around us.” Once I was able to truly listen to what my mind was telling me we needed to do, I was able to see my parents’ offer as a path toward healing rather than a sign of defeat. I resolved to carefully plan our departure so as not to inflict yet another major disruption to the kids’ lives, especially to Nikki’s. She was doing well and loved her elementary school, so I decided that we would stay until she graduated.

  With that decision made that night, for the first time since Wes had died, I slept soundly and fully in the room I’d been avoiding for months.

  Two years later, as we turned off the Bronx River Parkway and made our way through familiar streets, Shani and Wes, who had been dozing, suddenly sat up. As we drew closer, they wiggled in their seats. Just as I had pictured it, when we pulled in front of my parents’ house the front door instantly flew open and there stood my parents on the front stoop, arms open to receive us. As Nikki and I grabbed the suitcases from the trunk, Wes and Shani unfastened their seat belts and ran to their grandparents.

  My father, now a retired pastor with a heart as big as his beloved Mets stadium, stood only five foot five, but his muscular physique more than made up for his small frame. He lifted both Wes and Shani up in one huge hug. Seeing him standing there, looking both old and incredibly strong, I found myself remembering his own story of a difficult homecoming.

  Originally from Jamaica, my grandfather immigrated to the United States to attend Howard University, eventually becoming a minister and moving his wife and growing family, which would soon include my dad, to establish a church community in Charleston, South Carolina. A student of scripture, he had a difficult time reconciling the cruelty he saw around him with the word of God, and his pulpit became his megaphone against the discrimination and violence in the South. As stories of lynching became more and more prevalent, he became more and more vocal. This earned him the respect of his congregation but also a place on the watch list of the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually, under the cover of darkness, he was forced to move his family back to Jamaica to escape the growing threats of his own lynching.

  Remembering my family’s legacy in that moment put the angst of my homecoming in humbling perspective. It also reminded me that while change is a constant variable in life, no change is permanent. My father realized his father’s dream decades later by coming back to America with my mother, becoming the first ordained African American minister of the historically all-white Dutch Reformed Church, building a dynamic church community in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, eventually buying his own home, and raising a family.

  I awoke from my reverie to my mother’s joyful West Indian lilt. “You go along now, children, and get yourselves settled. You know Papa Jim has been cooking for you all day!” She looked a lot younger than I felt, her slightly gray hair Jheri-curled beautifully and her smile radiant, as it always was when she saw her grandchildren. Now she would have them around all the time. I hoped she would keep smiling.

  Shani and Wes rushed inside, while Nikki dragged her suitcase onto the stoop. “Oh my, Nikki, look how much you’ve grown,” my mother said, even though she’d seen Nikki only a few weeks before at her elementary school graduation. Nikki smiled, a rarity these days, and I thought I even saw her thrust back her shoulders with pride as she followed her grandmother into the house. My mother knew how to lift your spirits like no one else I knew. I was looking forward to more of that. After my father helped me hoist the last suitcase up the steps, he gave me the longest, tightest, most loving hug I can ever remember receiving from him. “Joy, I’m so glad you’re here.” In that moment, I was beginning to think I might be glad as well.

  My parents’ house made up for its small size with the elasticity of its walls. Whenever family or friends needed a safe haven or just a place to stay, the walls of that little place expanded, and the fo
od was always plentiful despite my parents’ tight, carefully kept budget. As I entered the house I smelled the familiar scent of sautéed onions, green peppers, thyme, and garlic, which meant my father’s trademark codfish dish was simmering on the stove.

  While the children all started reacquainting themselves with their new home, I went upstairs to my old bedroom where I would sleep once again. I went to the window to take comfort in the familiar view of tidy rows of homes with barely a foot of space between them. I always felt our block was a little island of safety and stability, and it still felt that way. But now I was seeing those streets with the eyes of a mother whose children would be walking them every day. I’d felt a little uneasy on the drive in as I took in some disturbing changes in the neighborhood. The stores on Burke Avenue, the main shopping street, had metal security gates, and many of those gates were covered in graffiti. I saw encroaching signs of decay in neighboring houses, and on too many front stoops groups of idle young men. As comforting as it was to be home, I felt a twinge of doubt.

  “Joy!” my mother yelled up the stairs. “Come join us while the food is hot!” I snapped out of it. No homecoming was complete without a Jamaican feast. My doubts would have to wait.

  In addition to codfish, my father had cooked my favorite boiled green bananas, and mom’s rolled biscuits were fried to golden perfection. As my father blessed the meal (it was a short grace, once again), I looked around to the faces of my three kids, one by one. Our family, with me at the helm, was starting a new chapter. I was not naive enough to think that our challenges were over, but sitting at the table, surrounded by my children and my parents, I finally remembered how it felt to be at peace.

  LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Do not fight against your pain.