Strength to carry on

"This is why one must say Yes to life and embrace
it wherever it is found--and it is found in
terrible places; nevertheless, there it is: and if the
father can say, Yes, Lord, the child can learn that
most difficult of words, Amen."
--James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

The decision to quit my job as a bookstore manager for a major retail chain and become a full-time caregiver for my severely diabetic and arthritic mother, then seventy-seven years old, was neither an easy nor a practical one to make. I knew that I stood to lose a great deal financially because we lived in a state, Georgia, that did not provide supplemental income for volunteer caregivers.  One's sacrifice was one's choice. I knew, too, that emotionally and spiritually I would often likely find myself treading the very thinnest of ice.

 The fact that the long hours of retail management allowed me just enough financial flexibility to pay someone else to care after my mother was something I could no longer ignore.  Moreover, ten to twelve hours of building displays, training employees, and repeating a thousand times per hour that the customer is always right no matter how utterly abusive was generally followed by an evening of cooking, cleaning, and nursing, or a night of unrelenting trauma at a hospital. Years of such a regimen can challenge the physical and mental integrity of even the most serene spiritual beings.  Hiring myself out to hire someone else in depleted the quality of my life rather than enhanced it. 

There was also one other important factor: although my job as a bookseller had allowed me to contribute to the education of my community and to introduce numerous youth to the profession, it had also claimed hours and years I would have preferred to spend on my own writing. I had drawn much solace and encouragement from selling books at a time--throughout the 1990s--when black authors in the United States were experiencing a surge in popularity that surpassed even that of the Harlem Renaissance writers in the 1920s through 1930s and that of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s.  I enjoyed a great deal of a militant's satisfaction in my full-wall displays of works by Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker in a chic southern mall bookstore where blacks and whites alike expected to encounter an occasional African-American face behind a register or broom but not smiling at them from the glittering displays reserved for bestsellers. And more than a little inspiration warmed my soul when I hosted book signings and other literary events with such authors as Tina McElroy Ansa, John Berendt, J. California Cooper, E. Lynn Harris, Pearl Cleage, Susan Taylor, Kephra Burns, and Reg E. Gaines. Whereas such encounters quieted my hunger for a time, I had known since the age of eighteen that only my full-fledged entry into the ranks of authorship would wholly satisfy it.

At the age of forty-two, the possibility of staying home to take care of my mother while pursuing my dream of establishing myself as a writer struck me as highly feasible. Possibly even divinely intuited. If I could somehow, I decided, gain my bank account's cooperation, I would release the false security of a job that could only result in my eventual collapse and I would take a spirited leap of faith toward achieving a dream I had deferred all my adult life.
 
The window of my opportunity opened when I received notice from a tax advisor that I was due income tax refunds for three consecutive years.  That discovery struck me amazingly like a sign urging me to take the leap in question. The remainder of my doubt vanished when I also received a freelance assignment from a major magazine and added to it projected severance pay from unused vacation time. I had in place a viable plan. Still, could I really quit my job and give up my regular pay with benefits in order to remain home caring for my mother while simultaneously attempting once and for all to "make it" as a writer? Apparently I really could because, loaded down with hardcore dread, I really did.

I quelled the terror that nearly forced me to retract my resignation by reminding myself that I was not completely without potential or accomplishments as a writer. I had been a military journalist in Alaska and England for six years before later winning some local renown as a poet at the beginning of the modern spoken word movement. I had also written a column on exploring personal spirituality and published an essay called This Mother's Son in Essence Magazine.  I followed the essay with the release of a collection of my short stories and poetry titled I Made My Boy Out of Poetry.  None of these had been sufficient enough to raise my writing career to a level beyond marginal. I decided these achievements were, however, sufficient reason to further invest in my potential as an author and human being.

Providing full-time care for my mother was quite a different matter. Since giving up my townhouse and moving into her house--purchased by my half-siblings and I--several years before, I had learned why many people opted not to care for aging parents at home. Few things are as difficult as daily placing the basic needs of another adult before one's own, especially when one of the adults is an elder content to spend her days reflecting on her past and the other a man approaching middle age determined to fulfill a lifelong ambition.  I also, at times, found it challenging to reconcile the fact that I had friends my mother's age and older who did not require the extensive attentions of another. With them, until I could no longer take the time to do so, I went to movies, lunch, poetry readings, art shows, and festivals.  Following my fate-filled decision, my outings were restricted to drug stores, grocery stores, doctors' offices, and hospitals.  

Be the above as it may, I adjusted to the impact on my income and made my peace with memories of growing up in a household where whatever attention came my way was something very different from loving or caring.  My earliest memories of my mother did not bring me joy; they stung my mouth with the taste of tears and tightened my face with apprehension. I had been the last of her fourteen children.  A woman who had migrated out of rural Georgia to the urban center of Savannah in the 1940s, WillieMae Griffin Lloyd was a widow by the age of thirty-three and raised alone the ten offspring that survived infancy. Of those ten, one fell to a policeman's bullet in the early 1960s, in a time and society that considered the death of black youth unremarkable and the grief of black women dispensable. Like many black matriarchs of the era, a singular pride, quiet desperation, and abiding faith became her constant companions. Much later I would understand how day to day survival under such circumstances tended to dilute a human being's capacity for expressive affection.

If I dwelled upon the abuses of my childhood, or even considered too long the fact that as an adult I did not fall into the category of a favored son or golden grandchild, resentment would have weighed me down like a coffin and made it impossible to serve as a caregiver. If I welcomed the power of forgiveness and the opportunity to further my own spiritual evolution, any number of healing revelations might bless both our lives.  What I chose to do was honor the struggles and triumphs of her life to the best of my ability as an act of service to Divinity and as an act of trust in my own capacity for faith, hope, and charity.

Having made my decision, I devised a schedule to help me stick to it.  Each morning, I woke up an hour before the time to administer my mother's medications and serve her breakfast. I spent twenty minutes meditating and another twenty minutes reading affirmations and poems that inspired me to release doubt and fear and embrace courage and faith.  The remaining twenty minutes I used to line up Mom's medicine: insulin needle, nitroglycerin patch, before-breakfast pills for arthritis and diabetes, and after-breakfast pills for kidney disorder, congestive heart failure, and chronic pain.  I did not eat breakfast but cooked specifically for her to stave off any fluctuations in her condition likely to send us zooming in an ambulance to the hospital in the middle of the night. A Medicaid-sponsored homecare assistant usually arrived following breakfast, which might take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half.  The homecare assistant (for whom I am grateful to this day) normally visited for a single hour per day during the week and five hours per day on the weekend to check Mom's vital signs and assist her with personal care, then wish us a blessed day.

My first writing shift would begin while Mom was still having breakfast and would last until I broke my own fast around 1 p.m.  My second writing shift would then begin at 2 p.m., when Mom would have lunch, and last until time to prepare dinner. Aside from modifications in her medicines, our lunch and dinner routines basically resembled that of breakfast.  The primary difference was that I always made it a point to sit down and share the evening meal. And on some nights, rather than rushing off to my third writing shift, I would watch a video with her before preparing her room and laying out her gown for bed.

In WillieMae's words, some days were better than others. On the better days, we stayed within thirty minutes of our schedule and I would only drop off sleeping once while working at the computer.  The worse days usually began in the middle of the night with a fall out of bed that would leave Mom disoriented for a time or with a bout of nausea that might take half a day or longer to get under control.     

Using a ten-year-old computer programmed only for word processing, I wrote for several mainstream publications articles on black history and culture that were described as good but ultimately inappropriate and never published.  I had better luck with sales of my poetry, a few speaking engagements, and occasional royalties from my first book. In the absence of a book contract or freelance assignments, I completed writing a volume of poetry and started again on a novel I had set aside repeatedly while managing bookstores.  My progress, as before, remained evident but not life transforming. 

A year after quitting  my job, I had depleted my financial resources and fallen prey to the modern malady of credit card debt. Although I did not like the idea of returning to a job for which I no longer felt enthusiasm, I had to be realistic about my options. Should my older half-siblings present any alternatives, they would certainly be welcomed.  As it was, I was weighing the pros of nursing homes against reports of nursing home abuses when I received a call from Sandra Lavonne West, an old friend and fellow writer in Richmond, Virginia.  She had informed me some months before that she and a partner, author Dorothy Rice, were working on something new and exciting: an encyclopedia on the Harlem Renaissance, a proposed 800-page book projected to become the most comprehensive title on the much-celebrated subject.  The thought of such a project had made me drool with a gnawing intellectual lust that something half as good might come my way.  I hoped she would ask me to contribute an article or two. Then Sandra explained that owing to family obligations and other professional commitments, her original partner would not be able to co-author the encyclopedia after all.  Would I be interested in working with her on it?  For about thirty seconds my mind excused itself from our conversation while I tried to understand what Sandra had asked.  She repeated the question and I panicked with a terrified joy. While I had fantasized about contributing an article to the encyclopedia, she was now asking me to write at least half of it. 

My life did not flash before my eyes in the grip of that alarming moment; that of the extraordinary ancestors whose lives I was being asked to chronicle did: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, James Weldon Johnson, Florence Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and numerous others whose lives had defined both a major part of black history and much of the history of American democracy.  The scorching light of their greatness humbled me and, unexpectedly, I felt wholly unworthy to tell their stories. A cold shadow filled my heart as I told Sandra I wasn't qualified to co-author an encyclopedia.  However, I would be happy to help her find a co-author and thrilled to contribute a couple of articles.  
    
The candidates I had in mind all held Ph.D.s and corresponding academic posts that pre-empted the time required to research and compose half an encyclopedia.  The independent scholars I approached felt daunted by the magnitude of the book.  As I continued working on my self-assigned novel and monitoring my mother's well-being, I began to lapse into long periods of waking dreams. I was sitting at my ten-year-old computer when a woman garbed in the classic image of Harriet Tubman appeared one day to announce, I didn't go back an' forth fetchin' them slaves cause I thought I was special.  I did it cause it had to be done. I started to point out that she was not part of the Harlem Renaissance when the image stated, Boy you know that ain't even the point.  And disappeared.  On another day, Frederick Douglass popped up and counseled, None of us became the figures you recognize us as until afterwards. Honor the work and the work will honor you. It went that way for days until I felt at times as if a conference of ancestors was taking place in my home. This is what you wanted, and this is what the universe means for you to have.  Take it.

I finally gave in and told Sandra that, pending the approval of her agent, Stephany Evans, and the encyclopedia's publisher, Facts On File, I would accept the challenge of co-authoring the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.  My one major regret was that the deadline for completing the encyclopedia was the very next summer.  After agreeing verbally to work on the encyclopedia in October 2000 and not signing an actual contract until March 2001, completing the encyclopedia by July 2001 struck me as highly unrealistic. Still, the gesture of a small advance from our agent and the contractual promise of further advances with the completion of each third of the book encouraged me to try my best.  I was also encouraged at the thought that Sandra had already started on the book, having plotted out the list of entries and began identifying sources for photographs.

I began by investing the last of my savings into an updated computer, purchased during a Thanksgiving Day sale and programmed for such modern writing essential as email and Internet capability.  Atop the hutch of my obligatory new computer desk, I placed for inspiration a postcard photograph of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, another of Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke (courtesy of my co-author), and a four-inch tall laughing Buddha carved from ebony wood.  The laughing Buddha had been presented to me by a writer friend suffering from AIDS, and who, watching me attempt to elevate my career while taking care of my mother, cautioned me that, "Without laughter, we don't get far at all in this life my friend." With those parting words, he died a few days later. If that brave soul could die laughing, I told myself, then I could damn sure live trying.    
 
And so I did.  I scheduled research trips to the library around Mom's meals and medication schedule.  With my initial token advance and generally below-poverty-level budget, I ordered research books from discount catalogues and unearthed rare jewels out of used bookstores.  I was particularly gratified to discover that some of the books I had purchased all over the world--San Francisco, Philadelphia, London--and had been hauling around for decades, contained information on the Harlem Renaissance that was not available elsewhere.  Furthermore, neither were the books.

For my mother's medical appointments when I knew I would be sitting for hours, I began to take with me a tote bag filled with pens and notebooks to work wherever I happened to be. During one such visit to Mom's diabetes specialist, the brilliant and amicable Dr. Calvin L. Butts, something astonishing occurred.  As Dr. Butts examined my mother while I sat beside her, he mentioned off-handedly that he was reading a book about his hometown of Sparta, Georgia, and that it contained some interesting information about the family of Jean Toomer. "You know, one of those writers back there during the Harlem Renaissance."  Indeed. Sitting in my bag was a notebook with an incomplete outline for my article on Jean Toomer and the information I still needed to fill in was that on Toomer's family in Sparta. Dr. Butts offered to let me look at the book while he completed Mom's examination. By the time he was done, I had filled in the blanks of my outline and excitedly wrote the article later that evening.

I had expected that we would likely miss the established deadline for the encyclopedia's completion and we did. Missing a deadline was something I had never done as the editor of a weekly military newsmagazine, at RAF Lakenheath in England, and doing so with the encyclopedia distressed me.  Yet I had to acknowledge my circumstances and the impact of having started six months after the project's official beginning. 

In the meantime, the threat of kidney failure nearly forced my mother to go on dialysis, a prospect that terrified me because the only treatment option open to her was one requiring the mechanical circulation of her blood outside her body in order to cleanse it before installing it back inside her body.  The process was one she likely would not survive more than half a year. By the grace of cleansing herbal teas, hard prayers, an heroic fraction of a single kidney, and whatever favor Heaven chose to grant us, my mother's then seventy-nine-year-old body stumped her doctors as her condition stabilized and we escaped that particularly traumatic dilemma. Then came an acid twist of irony: just before Mom's 80th birthday, her oldest daughter succumbed to the very condition that she herself had somehow eluded. Three months later, a second daughter was lost to cancer. In the face of tragedy, I saw my family turn repeatedly toward my mother for emotional and spiritual strength.  She obviously was in no better condition than anyone else to provide such strength but I came to understand that the importance of her remaining among us had to do with even more than honoring her life as I had chosen to do.  It involved preserving the symbol of endurance, advancement, and triumph that she had become for the four generations that began with her. Less comprehensible was that so many depended on her as a living symbol to sustain their spirits but so few were willing to contribute to her support.

My position as my mother's primary caregiver, I realized, was not unique.  At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 22,000,000 Americans were in a similar position that had forced them to adjust daily routines, professional lives, and even individual quirks of personality.  For many, more challenging than the time and energy required to provide care, was the fact that they were now responsible for someone who had been utterly abusive towards them when they were children and in need of ongoing care.

In my own case, oscillating back and forth between the often painful demands of family responsibility and the powerful challenge of completing the encyclopedia, I frequently sought and surrounded myself with inspiration of every kind.  Sitting on the back porch one day while taking a break, I saw a squirrel fall from a power line into the street directly in front of a car.  The drop from the power line had to have been at least thirty feet and I'm certain the hit from the car must have hurt.  Yet the squirrel took the fall and the hit with whatever pain was involved, scrambled to the other side of the street, and made its way back up a tree.  Well damn, was about the only thing I could say.  Who was I to cry about the challenges in my life when a little squirrel could take such a monstrous beating from the world and still keep on keeping on?  From where had its strength to carry on come? From Divine will?  From the animal instinct that somewhere on the other side of the trauma just experienced was a satisfying treasure of buried nuts or a rendezvous, perhaps, with a mate or offspring?  Self pity was obviously something for which the squirrel had no use whatsoever.  Witnessing its example, I took three slow deep breaths and went back to my computer.

A great deal of inspiration came to me as well from the very lives about which I was writing.  As painfully schizophrenic as I might have felt on certain days, hopping back and forth between the roles of dutiful son and determined writer, any possibility for despair vanished as I peered through history and saw: Margaret Walker raising her family and caring after her invalid husband while pursuing her doctorate and writing the masterful historical novel Jubilee; or Eugene Jacques Bullard making his way as a teenager from Georgia to France, suffering incredible wounds on the battlefields of  World War I, then becoming the first African-American combat pilot; or Claude McKay, surviving poverty and oppression while spinning out one literary masterpiece after another. Them and so many others. None of those great souls had had the odds in their favor. I thought of them and took heart from a quote posted on the kitchen wall of my friend, Dr. Patricia Stewart: "And in between these rocks and hard places, I am making diamonds." Those words joined the items of inspiration above my computer. 

I trudged on with my work, falling in love with the strength and beauty of my forebears, weeping as the whisper of their souls urged me not to stop.  A day came, almost another year after the original deadline, when I gathered all of my files combined with those of my co-author's and completed a word count to determine how close we were to finishing the encyclopedia.  My initial calculation placed our combined files at a figure that I was certain must be wrong because it equaled some 3,000 words more than we were supposed to write to fill 800 pages.  Even if I was right, there would still be months of proofreading, editing, constructing maps, writing captions for photos, and more proofreading and much more last-minute editing. But still, if I was right, the hardest part of the long difficult haul would have ended.  I performed the calculations three more times and nearly cried as the same figure came up repeatedly.  In the haze of a joy-filled daydream, I saw the faces of many beautiful ancestors. Someone said, Every little bird know it can't fly until it jumps. What that meant I wasn't sure and began writing emails to my co-author and agent: "Guess what? I've got some great news..."
 

Aberjhani is the author of three books - THE WISDOM OF W. E. B. DU BOIS; I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE  HARLEM . The essay describes his attempt to complete the encyclopedia.

Skylarkshine@aol.com

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