Going Home
My uncle died last Thursday. Everyone called him Green Bean. He was tall and lanky and walked everywhere he went. He didn’t have a car and rarely bathed, so I’m sure he would’ve been too embarrassed to ask anyone for a ride. He lived alone in my grandparents’ house without lights or running water. There was mold growing in the back bedroom. I’m sure it had spread to other areas of the house. It had been like that for a while.
My grandparents’ house was condemned on Wednesday, June 5, 2019, at 10:25 A.M. I know the exact date and time because a sheriff affixed a bright orange notice to the front door with black electrical tape. They took a picture to commemorate the moment, attached it to a file that I happened to get ahold of. It is the only picture of him that I have. My uncle is standing off to the side with his eyes partially closed, sweating, his clothes hanging off of him, looking like the addict he was. As soon as the sheriff left, he must have taken the notice down. I never saw it after the photo. He probably threw it away and continued living like a hermit, like a caveman.
The last time I’d gone to my grandparents’ house, it had been more than a year ago. Code enforcement had come, no doubt called by some of the neighbors. The paint was peeling off the outside. Window screens were missing. The roof was in horrible shape. I’d never seen a roof that looked like it was melting away, but that’s how the roof of my grandparents’ house appeared, as if it had grown tired of covering the crumbling mess it had become. My uncle tried to talk to me when I showed up that day but I wouldn’t talk to him. I could have killed him. The fact that he had let my grandparents’ house get in such awful shape angered me more than anything had in a while. When he tried to speak, I turned and walked away. I got into my car and drove off without saying a word. I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him alive.
When I looked in through the front door that day, I noticed there was a hole in the living room ceiling that ran all the way up through the trusses and the roof. It looked like a monster had reached down and smashed a fist into it. My uncle had pulled a mattress out of one of the bedrooms and it was lying on the floor right under the hole surrounded by trash. Lying down on the mattress he could look up into the sky. I wondered how it made him feel, if it brought him closer to God.
My uncle had been on drugs as far back as I can remember, at least since I was a child. He drank a lot, never really worked. He could always be seen in the area near the house with a brown paper bag containing a bottle of whatever his pleasure was. He did odd jobs to get a few bucks. Many family members, myself included, had given him money to get the lights and water turned on numerous times over the years. He would keep them on for a few months and then they’d be off once again. We all stopped giving him money when we realized it would only go to drugs. This last stretch without lights and water had been at least 8 or 9 years.
My mom and I realized that if we didn’t step in, the house would fall down around him or be taken away because he wouldn’t pay the taxes. She’s paid them since my grandma died in 2009. My ex-husband put a new roof on the house last year, had the yard cleaned up, painted the outside, and bought new window screens. My uncle had been using buckets for a toilet and dumping everything outside in a field behind the house. That had to be cleaned up too.
He didn’t used to be as bad as he was in the years before he died. I remember a time when he was freshly showered, wore cologne and liked to show off the outfits he wore. I remember when he drove around in an old gray car, when he had a girlfriend and roommates who would help him pay bills. He used to be funny, and had a great laugh and wonderful smile.
There were quite a few good times before all the bad ones. He got along with everyone and had a great relationship with my older son. He loved my grandmother, his mom, very much. She was my favorite person too. He was in jail when she died; they wouldn’t let him out to attend her funeral. I think it changed him. It was the second time that he had been incarcerated when one of his parents died. He was locked up when my grandfather passed away as well; they wouldn’t let him out for his funeral either. I can’t imagine how he felt not being able to attend the funerals of either of his parents. I think it was the beginning of the end for him. Maybe he stopped caring about life.
My cousin was the one who called me last Thursday to tell me my uncle was dead. A neighbor hadn’t seen him much the day before or that morning, and thought it was unusual since she normally saw him sweeping the front porch every morning. When someone walked up to the house, there were flies all over the front windows. After I received the call, I frantically tried to reach my mom, but couldn’t get through to her at work. I left a few messages, and by the time she called me back, I was already heading to my grandmother’s house. When I got there, the police were standing out front with my aunt and another cousin. The front door was locked, so we had to wait until my mom came with a key for us to get inside. The window screens had been ripped off and both front windows were pushed up. The smell, I will never forget that smell. My aunt suggested I put a mask on, and I grabbed one from my car before walking up to the house where I spent the majority of my childhood. I bent down a little and peeked in through the open front window just enough to see the outline of his body lying on the antique couch in the living room. His head was turned to the right like he was sleeping. His face had a faint purple tint. I saw his feet, skinny and emaciated looking on the end of the couch right where my grandmother used to sit when she watched her soaps. I didn’t look too closely, didn’t want to see something I couldn’t get out of my head, the blurry view of him without my glasses on was enough. As if his dead body wasn’t enough lying there in the house, there were also a few buckets that he had been using as toilets still full in the living room. I would have had to take a thousand showers if I had gone inside that house.
After seeing him, I started to feel sick. The flies, the smell, the fact that he died in that way and no one would have known if the neighbor hadn’t walked over that morning. It was all too much. I walked away from everyone and crossed the street into the neighbor’s yard and bent over. I stood there holding on to my knees, feeling like I would pass out. I think they were the only thing that held me up. Everything seemed to be spinning. The coroner came and went inside once the front door was unlocked. I left shortly after.
I followed my mom to her house and sat with her for a while. We were mostly quiet as we sat in her den, uttering a few words in between the silence. For some reason, that smell lingered in my nose for nearly an hour. I couldn’t seem to get rid of it. I took some aspirin, washed my face, cleaned out my nose, and finally felt a little better. I will never forget feeling as if his death wasn’t going to let me go.
Of course he had no will, no money, no bank account, nothing of value that I knew of. I was told when his body was taken away, a few of the people who were standing around went inside my grandparents’ house. I don’t know how they could with the mold, the smell, the buckets, the flies. When the coroner went in to confirm he was dead they were wearing some type of hazmat suit. Why would anyone want to go in there with no protection?
His phone and wallet went missing. We have no idea what happened to them. We also couldn’t locate his food stamp card. Someone must have figured they could get a few groceries at a dead man’s expense.
My uncle would have been sixty this year. He never married, never had any kids. He never even had a job for an extended period of time. One of my worst fears is living my life and having it mean nothing. I have no idea why I feel that way, but I always have. I’ve been married and divorced, earned a few degrees, traveled quite a bit. I have four sons. There will always be a bit of me left when I’m gone, but I’ve always wanted to leave something that I created alone, something that’s one hundred percent me. I can’t explain it, maybe that’s where the writing comes in. It’s all from my head, things I make up, things I experience, things I see. I do feel bad because my uncle left nothing.
We had his funeral a week later. He had to be cremated because of the decomposition. I’m sure the fact that there was no air conditioning or ventilation in my grandparents’ house made it worse. The contents of the house had been destroyed long ago with the mold and rain and no one had a current picture of him. I didn’t want to use the one from the condemned notice so I searched online and found a picture from one of the times he was incarcerated. I downloaded the picture and cropped it a little so you couldn’t see the blue jail uniform he was wearing and I sent it to CVS. I made it into an 8x10 and that’s what we sat on a table in a frame next to two white floral arrangements for his memorial. My mom and I thought that only a few people would show up to the service, but there was actually a pretty good crowd. Some extended family came, some of his friends. You could tell which ones were druggies, their bodies looked sunken and sullen just like his always did.
We sang religious songs and listened to bible verses for forty-five minutes. We laughed and rejoiced. The memorial was a million times better than I expected a memorial service for someone who had battled a life-long drug addiction to be. It felt like home.
After the service, a few family members and friends went to Longhorn Steakhouse. We ate and talked. I hadn’t eaten much since I saw my uncle through the window the week before. How he died left me with an ache in the pit of my stomach. Alone, with no one there, waiting on someone to find him before the flies did. I knew there wouldn’t be room for food for quite a while.
My uncle made me think about the fact that many of us are walking around with unhealed wounds, things we don’t talk about, things we let eat away at us, things we let simmer and fester and never boil over. How we sometimes hold stuff in until it destroys us.
He made me think about how many of us put up with things to avoid having to face ourselves. We use food, drugs, shady relationships, sex, and ungrateful friends as band-aids for things that would otherwise require major operations. Operations which always need time for reflection and recovery, time to return us back to the center where we are supposed to be.
I regret that he died in the way that he did, that I didn’t talk to him the last time I saw him, that I walked away in anger. His life will always feel incomplete, as if sixty years weren’t enough time for him to turn things around, find some kind of healing, to do something great, to get it right. To finally improve and become better than the person he was when he left this place. I pray that he is finally at peace.
Kimberly LaRocca is a native of Clearwater, Florida. She attained an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Tampa. Kimberly’s books include five collections of poetry, A Black Girls Poetry for the World, My Mind’s Temple, Inside Gray Matters, The Black Experience, Waves, and the insightful What My Grandma Taught Me, a self-help book packed with wisdom passed down through generations. She has also published Death and Other Things, a collection of short stories that feature death as their central theme, and includes “Things Left Unsaid,” which is featured in The Avalon Literary Review. Her essay, Self-Love, was featured in Munaku Magazine. In her free time Kimberly enjoys reading and watching movies, but with traveling she has found a true passion. Since getting the travel bug she has visited many countries in Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Latin America.