ALL MY HEROES WERE DEAD

I’m Not Going to Wash That Gray Right Out of My Hair Anymore

Life is for the living and the dead

Acceptance is letting my hair go white or gray or whatever color it decides it wants to be. I hope white. My Papa’s was bright white. His fierce exuberant Russian eyebrows remained shoe leather black till the day he died. He was a black-and-white photograph in motion.

When Papa got old, he told me, “Aging isn’t distinguished. It’s insulting.” What was the point of working himself to the bones when it all ended the same way?

Acceptance of aging, for me, is walking around in sweatpants and robes and feeling warm instead of cute. Turning off the sitcoms and making my own life the show.

I’m not one of those women who says “I’m gonna be hot till the day I die.” I’ll settle for happy. More than settle. That’s what I’m going for.

When my dad was my age, he was calling up people from his deathbed, saying “Well, Bill, this is it.” Dad was a painter, once a writer. Calling people from the half-a-century of his life was his way of scribbling The End.

“I’m calling it. I’m checking out,” he told caller after caller.

Around that time, car phones had just become a thing and several people he called said, “Hold on, Joe. Let me pull over.”

My dad had a great smile, without showing his teeth. His mouth stretched across, but didn’t crack open. His sealed-tight smiling lips looked like he was a balloon about to pop. Like a Jack-in-the-box with unyielding springs. Like a sugar-filled kid savoring sizzling Pop Rocks. Like a cage holding onto a sparrow until its broken wing healed. No teeth though. No fight in his smile. Just acceptance that something was funny.

Whenever people lose someone, I never say, “Don’t worry. They’re still there with you,” because when someone said that to me, I wanted to punch them in the face.

It is true that the dead never leave, but sure feels like they did. Hearing they’re still with you from someone living feels like a knife jamming around in an open wound.

I lost my oldest friend when he was 21. So was I. I became possessed. Even though I wasn’t there when it happened, I felt responsible. If I were there, I could have kept him from slipping out that window. I could have found the strength, no matter how hard it was raining, to yank him up, pull him in. He was my first friend. I could have lifted a bus off of him. He was my responsibility to keep alive.

I don’t have any pictures of myself from that era because those were the days of 35mm cameras and cameras were too big and heavy to carry around in your pocket. If my friend died now, I would have deleted all those photos from my phone because they were haunted.

Those years with my old friend were not my finest days, or hours, or minutes, or seconds. I had dropped out of college without even realizing I had. I was hanging out with criminals and lost souls. I don’t use the words lost souls lightly. I’m not being trite or feigning poetry.

We were so goddamn lost, none of us could have given you a clue where we were. One friend had just lost both her parents to alcohol. Another had lost his father to a train crash and was living off the Metra payoff in fast cars and leather jackets. Another was a criminal and used to threaten me. Another was sweet but when he drank, his face transformed into someone you wouldn’t look towards if you were in trouble. Another was on her way to Harvard. Another was a prima ballerina. It takes all kinds of lost.

We all drank a lot together. We drove through neighborhoods where, if you were white, you got pulled over because they assumed you were buying drugs. You were. Half of us were white. We got pulled over a lot. The cops would say “Go home.” We would. Eventually.

They say your body is a temple, but in those days, after one of us died, my body became a haunted house. I ate, slept, and dreamed his death over and over.

Then, one night having dinner at my mom's, seeing the depth of my despair, her dinner guest said, “He’s still here with you, Amy.” I wanted to punch her in the face, but polite behavior won out. How dare she? She, who got to be old. She, who got so many chapters.

When my father died, I realized she was right. The dead don’t all leave. My dad didn’t. My friend did. He was gone. Really dead. 21 years wasn’t enough. He never got to the other side of his hell. I never got to see him grown.

50 years isn't enough either, but at least Dad accumulated some history. Dad got to call people and say “I’m checking out.”

When I was young, I didn’t think I’d live to be old. All my heroes were dead. James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin.

My friend.

Acceptance that life goes on is letting my hair get white or gray or whatever the hell it decides to be. It means being warm instead of being cute. It means outliving my heroes.

This morning my son said, “I like the white in your hair, Mom. It doesn’t make you look old.”

That made me happy. I’d survived some of my adventures. I don’t expect to die young anymore. I was tired of dying my hair anyway, trying to lasso time in a bottle.

Acceptance is being grateful for the stories I’ve already accrued. Dad’s hair never got white. Neither did my friends. My Papa’s did and it was beautiful. Why should I hide it? I lived it.

Thanks to Debra G. Harman for making a home for my writing.