[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] Three days after my grandmother died, I bought a brand new luxury SUV. It turns out shopping, and I mean dig-in-your-heels research, and negotiate as if your life depends on it shopping, work excellently at keeping the grief at bay. I got a great deal on that and a few other completely unnecessary but coveted items during the week between her death and the funeral.
I can only imagine what you think of me. For many, this probably does not seem to be the most productive way to deal with grief. For me, it works. You should see the projects I’m working on next. Turns out in Los Angeles, there are plenty of ways to empty out your savings account. And plenty of people more than willing to help you.
While my grandmother has been sick for the last few months, and before and after her funeral I have been staying in her house. The same house she’s lived in for the past forty-one years. The house I lived in for five years in my childhood. The same house my mother and grandparents were thrilled to own in New York City – when home ownership was more difficult for those without many resources. The same house that went from being in a white working class neighborhood to being in the all black and Latino ghetto in less than ten years, but was never sold.
Living a Quality Life
While at that house, I realized something about how she’d lived much of her ninety-one years – by making do.
If black people were ever the poster children for anything other than crime, drugs and welfare, many of us could be the exemplar of the puritan ethic. My grandmother never said this, but “Make do, or do without,” could have been her personal motto.
Why get the hot water faucet fixed when cold water will do. Why install new flooring when this less than lustrous flooring has some life in it? Why get something new when the old one kind of still works? In my family, it had to be dead as a doornail before it was replaced.
But that’s from growing up poor and destitute, first in Mississippi, then New York. As the oldest of nine children in rural Mississippi, my grandmother and her family were used to doing without. As sharecropping put them farther and farther into debt year after year, they did without a lot. They wore shoes only in the winter. They ate mostly what they could grow themselves. Clothes were hand sewn and handed down. Beds were always shared.
I can only imagine when the Franklin family moved to Albany and then New York City that what was available seemed like so much. A world where everyone had one of their own (whether a bed or anything else). A place where indoor plumbing, and hot and cold running water, were taken for granted. My family was by no means rich once they got to the north, but in many respects, things were better. That didn’t always make things easier. Instead of having no choices – options were thrust upon them. This one or that one? Pleasure or necessity?
There were few pleasures when they were young, and more as my grandmother and her family got better situated. But it never extended to anything as outsized as new cars, much less so-called luxury vehicles or home remodeling.
This in stark contrast to life here in Los Angeles. When my grandmother visited my house for the first time years ago, she thought it very nice. Everything, in her eyes, was new and lovely.
In contrast my eagle-eyed fellow Angelenos always ask me when I’m going to renovate. My bathrooms, they tell me, are out of date. My kitchen cabinets tacky. And in new, new, new- obsessed Los Angeles, they are probably right. The eighties weren’t kind on style – and my house drips with gold faucets and blond wood.
Because I don’t want shopping to be a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week experience, I often make do as well. Being with my family these last months, however, has made me want to make do less – the opposite of what I expected to happen. I thought spending time with those who were frugal with their money and thoughtful of their purchases would be more reassuring. I thought that saving as much as possible for that long and inevitable future was the right thing to do. Instead, I’ve gone the other way.
I Need To Be Different
Death has made me want to seize the day. I don’t want to make do. I don’t want to do without. Now, more than ever, I want to live life fully. Turning forty late last year, coupled with this death, among others, and cancer scares from every direction, has given me a sense of carpe diem.
Didn’t like the car I’m driving, I got a new one. Hate the tacky, poorly designed kitchen in my house – I’m starting a remodel next week. Don’t use that paved backyard (my second in Los Angeles – what’s up with that?), get someone to jackhammer it up. I’m not sure if anything is gained by suffering. I’m not gunning for that Martyr of the Year award. The accolades of frugality aren’t going to keep me warm at night.
With death comes finality. There’s something to the adage about not being able to take it with you. Since I can’t take any of it anywhere, I plan to enjoy it now.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
