How loss brings you home
On Memoir: Love, loss, and the power in a name
When my son first started talking, I made a running list of everything he said. His first word that wasn’t mama or dada was "river," which didn’t surprise me. We walked by the river every day, sometimes twice a day, naming trees and counting wildflowers. We almost named him River but chose instead to name him Pressley, in honor of my late grandfather.
Lucius Pressley, or as I call him, my Grandpa Press, was my mother's father. He died before I was born, and his death was what sent my mother into a downward spiral. In a bid to immortalize my grandfather, I named my son after him, sensing a connection that transcended generations. Despite never meeting him, I feel like Grandpa Press has played a role in who I am and where I came from. The way Mom talks about him has brought him to life for me. I can see the parts of him in her—the joy she finds even in the mundane, how she doesn’t wallow even when things are hard, the way she tells jokes to keep herself from falling apart, and her struggle with addiction.
Grandpa Press was an alcoholic, the kind of alcoholic who could mostly function until one day he couldn’t. It didn’t start out like this. My grandmother said she loved him the moment she saw him from across the room at a dancing hall in France. She was born and raised in Belgium with French being her first language. She had a daughter when she was seventeen with a French football player who was in love with her but could never stay faithful. She married him anyway, and they moved to France. She would’ve raised her daughter mostly alone if it wasn’t for her mother who ended up coming to her rescue like good mothers often do.
My grandmother didn’t drink, but she danced and smoked, and with her mother now watching her child, she frequented the dance clubs to keep herself young, to keep herself sane, to keep herself distracted from her absent husband. That’s when she met my Grandpa Press. He’d been stationed in France with the Air Force, and was out dancing when she spotted him from across the room. He noticed her, too, and made his way to her table. They smoked and danced and said close to nothing since she didn’t speak a word of English and he knew very little French. Then, he left. My grandmother told the friend she’d come there with that she was in love with him. Her friend scoffed and said that he was an American and it wasn’t a good idea to fall in love with an American. But it was too late. Just as she was already falling deeper, he came back into the dancing hall. He found her, cigarette in hand, platinum hair piled on top of her head like a bouquet, and kissed her. Despite them both already being married, they fell in love that night.
My grandmother told her husband that she was leaving him, and he cut his wrists with a kitchen knife right there in front of her while they were standing by the sink. She rushed him to the hospital and said that she still had to go. She was moving to America with the military man, she said, and she was taking her daughter with her. The day she left for the airport, he ran after her taxi with his arms full of roses, screaming her name. She said she could hear it even after she could no longer see him. “Rosemarie! Rosemarie! Rosemarie!”
They made their way to California and had two kids, my mother and her brother Terry. Grandpa Press didn’t start drinking until he retired from the Air Force. My grandmother said that’s when he went crazy. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he picked up the bottle. She filed for divorce even though she was still madly in love with him because she couldn’t handle his drunk antics. He'd accidentally set their kitchen on fire, he’d pass out on bar stools and in public bathrooms, he’d be taken to the hospital by ambulance to have his stomach pumped because of alcohol poisoning, and sometimes he’d disappear for weeks.
When he’d finally come home, Mom would sneak him in through the back door so he could freshen up and change his clothes before my grandmother smelled the booze. And sometimes when he’d come home at dawn, Mom would try to get him into bed without my grandmother noticing. She’d lie for him and make up stories about where he was. She was his greatest confidant.
Grandpa Press died of lung cancer, but my grandmother said the drinking didn’t help matters because he developed cirrhosis of the liver. When Press was admitted to the hospital, my grandmother said she knew he was going to die. She watched my mother spiral into a black hole that she still hasn’t been able to fully climb out of. The loss of him broke Mom, took her from me before I was even born. She says she doesn’t remember the year (or two, maybe three) after Grandpa Press died. She was spinning so high on drugs that she stayed in a perpetual blackout.
A part of me felt like naming my son after my Grandpa Press would bring her back to me. I thought maybe my son would be enough to keep her because I never was. And it turns out, I was right. My mother’s entire life revolves around my son. She’s kept herself off meth for him. She says he’s her reason for breathing, her reason for living. She says he’s her light, her everything, and she’s afraid of how much she loves him. And I get that because I feel the same way.
But a part of Mom came back to me before my son was even born. She’d lived in California most of her life, and I never imagined her leaving, but I hoped she someday would. When my partner and I were looking for a place to call home, we traveled the country for somewhere that felt like rest. We drove over two thousand miles away from the Mojave where I grew up, and like a sudden patch of sunlight, I finally found it.
Home.
The sky was woven into the trees, and the air felt like rain. I could taste the wood smoke on my tongue from the fires burning inside the houses dotted along the mountainside. And everything was blue. As we drove past a renovated house from the 1940s nestled in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, I knew it was the one. It sat up on a hill with a for sale sign in the front yard with a concrete porch that was bigger than my entire Los Angeles apartment.
I could draw a straight line on the map from where Mom lived in the desert to our house on the hill—a twenty-two-hundred-mile line across the country. When I told Uncle Terry about the house I’d found in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he told me Grandpa Press had been born in Canton, North Carolina, the bordering town to my little mountain town. I had no idea Grandpa Press had any connection to North Carolina let alone that he was born ten minutes away from where I’d started building a life that truly felt like mine.
Uncle Terry told me about a time when he was in Canton and ran into the post office for stamps. Before reaching the customer desk, he noticed a black and white photo propped up on an easel in the lobby. Having served in the U.S. military himself, he noticed the uniforms of U.S. Army soldiers. He walked over to it and saw a face he recognized—his father’s. Uncle Terry thought it couldn’t possibly be his dad, but as he read the plaque below the photo, his jaw dropped. It read: “Lucius P. Pressley. March 1941.”
We’re going on seven years in these mountains that are always blue. We may not stay here forever, but I like to believe that it was my Grandpa Press who brought us here. It was as if he somehow knew that if I came here, Mom would find her way back to him.
I like to believe that it was Grandpa Press who brought Mom back to me, and it was my son who got her to stay.
When my grandfather was in the Air Force, he was called by his last name. Pressley turned to Press, and it stuck even after he retired. When I think about my son and consider when he’s older, maybe he, too, will go by Press instead of Pressley. I can picture us sitting on the floor in our living room lined with books going through old photographs of his great-grandfather.
“This is your Grandpa Press,” I’ll say. “Your namesake.”
“He’s the one who brought us home.”
OOOF, soo good. "She says he’s her reason for breathing, her reason for living. She says he’s her light, her everything, and she’s afraid of how much she loves him. And I get that because I feel the same way."