It was about 18 years ago that I walked into what is now my kitchen. My wife's parents owned it back then. It still showed its 1960s pedigree, from the brown wood paneling to the off-brown electric stove and wall oven that barely contained a Thanksgiving turkey. I loved it immediately.
I was there to charm her parents on the off chance that I might marry her, which was still a somewhat surprising turn of events for me. We'd started out friends who were supposed to be having a secret-and-therefore-twice-as-good fling before she moved away to a new job. A long distance relationship with a woman I intended to marry was an experience I'd done once before, and not one I cared to repeat.
Yet here I was, in a foreign land, Arkansas, which I usually only saw the top of during the nightly weather forecast. I attended Sunday services with them that weekend, and upon meeting me, a family friend actually said "Oh! A Yankee!" Which is the only time I've ever been called that in nigh onto 45 years.
Her parents made it so easy, though. They welcomed me into that kitchen as if I'd been coming for years. Her mom beamed and made me a standard meat-and-three dinner salute. Her dad offered me his hand and a seat.
He was a tall man, somewhat lanky but for the old-man potbelly, which lent him a whimsically dignified air. The body of a man who took excellent care of himself but would not suffer a life without pot roast and pie. His accent was pure thick hill country, a high baritone that leaned hard into its r's and lilted its way up to a high hee-heave, almost a giggle, when it laughed. He had the proper nose and ears of a grandfather, though he had just begun his practice when we met.
He stood by his daughter when we wed, and when the preacher asked who gives this woman to marry this man, he did not say I do. He said ARR FAMLEH in that grand Searcy County baritone of his, and stepped back to watch his eldest girl hitch herself to a skinny Yankee with a bad goatee and a fresh tattoo.
We continued to stand by each other as he stood by her that day. Through a whole passel of grandbabies, including two of my own making. Through birthday candles and disputes over silverware. Through flooded basements and tornado damage and, most notably, the absolute gutting of losing his wife to cancer.
He was determined to hang in after that. To be with his family. To be of use. He got more sentimental. He cried more. He beheld, and understood, what it was that he and his wife had built. The tragedy was that he didn't get more time to marvel over it with her.
We arranged to buy the house from him when his mind started to go. He did not insist so much as ask that we please, please continue to make the house be the gathering spot for holidays. We assured him that that was half the reason we wanted to buy it.
Now the kitchen is swathed in cooler modern neutrals, a mottled grey quartz countertop and white penny tile backsplash. The fridge and stove have swapped places. The oldest grandbaby is about to take the bar exam. The others are scattered across the continuum from college to fourth grade. Jim was there to beam and brag every step of the way.
He closed up shop on the last Sunday in March. It was a long and difficult path out, as it always is when you've been dealt dementia as the last great challenge of your life. It seemed unfair, and still does. He made the best of it for as long as he could, understandably railed against it harder than was probably wise. But he had always been of use and could not envision a life in which that was no longer true. It pained him to be bound to a chair and struggling to find a handhold on the world.
We got really lucky and found an actual house for him to live in at the end. Not a facility, a home with home-cooked meals and people to talk with. Just down the street from us, in fact. The next best thing to him coming home and a fine place in which to let go of this world. My wife sat by his side and held his hand when he finally did.
We buried him yesterday in the Ozarks clay that birthed him. Under a cottonwool sky in the same tiny cemetery just outside St. Joe that we all travel to religiously every Decoration Day. There could be no church service in the midst of a pandemic, and he wouldn't have wanted it. Just two men from the funeral home, a handful of Bible verses, and my boy leading us in Amazing Grace. We laid roses on his casket. I whispered my thanks to him for giving me my family. And then it was done.
His passing has been an agonizing relief, and bearing witness to his death has been packed full of life. It seems both just and criminal that a story such as his should have an end, but I remind myself that it is not really over. That even if there is nothing beyond the reach of our senses, no Heaven or Nirvana, he lives on in the people whose lives he irrevocably altered. I have his eldest daughter and two of his grandchildren. I have his home, the creek that runs past the giant crape myrtles, nearly two decades of stories. He left all of this and more, all that remains of him, in our care. We are his stewards, and we will honor him by giving him away.
Who gives this man? Arr famleh.