Last summer I discovered that death plus time can bring about a certain miracle: it restores to us the way they were.
When my older sister turned 70, she asked that all five siblings get together. It had been four years since our mother died, and 13 since the death of my father. After batting around options of where to meet up, we came to a quick consensus—to go “home” to Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C.
My brother drove us from one landmark to another—starting with the house where we grew up, to the drug store where I had my first job, to the park where I learned to play tennis, to our elementary and high schools, and, finally, dinner at the restaurant located a mile from our childhood home.
The residential neighborhoods looked remarkably similar, just spiffed up. The cars outside were fancier, the homes freshly manicured, painted, and renovated.
But those streets were eerily quiet. I remember them as teeming with children moving in and out of each other’s homes, playing kickball in the middle of those wide roads, dogs roaming freely, pooping wherever.
The emptiness practically begged to be populated with ghosts from my past. Then and now quickly blurred as I spotted my mother, wearing bobby socks and loafers, walking down the street carrying groceries. This was a very different iteration of the powerhouse legal figure she later became; rather I observed this slightly distracted, multi-tasking 30-something trained lawyer who practiced a form of “benign neglect” childrearing as she crafted legal briefs on a manual typewriter on the dining room table.
And then I caught glimpses of my dad–the gentle, affectionate, adventurous father who took us on barefoot walks in puddles after rainstorms, mixed iced tea with lemonade before Arnold Palmer, and occasionally let us ride on the roof of his car down the street. He loved to take us to department stores so we could ooh and ahh at the color television sets, still beyond our reach.
These were the “before” versions of my parents: before assassinations, wars and corruption knocked the political idealism out of them, before five teens and two demanding careers in one household threatened to collapse under its own weight at times.
Rather, I saw a young, idealistic Jewish/Catholic legal couple who moved to DC in the early 1950’s intent on using the law for noble purposes, produced five children in rapid fire succession, and then tried valiantly to combine political activism with legal careers and loving, if slightly chaotic, parenting.
They were engaging, lively company and it felt good to welcome them home after such a long absence.
Johanna Wald is a freelance writer, living in Massachusetts, who has been published in literary magazines and publications including slate.com, salon.com, the Huffington Post, and the Marshall Project.
