Tag: parents

Next Up

Two years after my Dad died and after a year of falls and infections and 6 weeks confined to a hospital bed, my Mom died. This past week family and friends gathered to laugh and to cry together. And to remember and to celebrate my Mom’s life. High School Valedictorian. Owner of a red convertible. Strong enough and in love enough to get on an airplane for the first time in her life in 1952 to fly to Alaska to marry my Dad. Elementary school teacher. Square dancer. And, so much more.

With her death, in our family, a generation passes away.
Now it is us.
We are the oldest.
The next up.
With my Dad’s death two years ago and with my Mom’s declining health this past year I have become ever more aware of my own mortality. As a friend said to me. We are in the final chapter of my life. I live with the questions.
How will I use the time I have left?
What can I learn from my parents about how will I manage my own declining health? How will I live towards my own death?
I have no answers.
Only the questions.

I Hope…

I visited my Mom this week.
Her life is winding down.
I sat by the side of her bed and we talked.
Small talk about the weather.
Remembering trips we took as a family.
Asking if she would like a sip of water.
In the silence between the conversations her gaze would be someplace else and I would look at her wondering where she was and what she was thinking. When I interrupted the silence and asked, her eyes would refocus on me and she would seemed surprised by the question. “I was just looking at the blankets stacked on the chair.” She said.

While I will never know
I hope, in those moments, she is someplace else.
Someplace beyond her hospital style bed.
Someplace beyond the walls of the skilled nursing facility which is now her home.

I hope she is someplace surrounded by the memories of my Dad.
And, the love they shared.
And, the years they had together.
And, their standing together to meet the challenges and joy of raising three sons and going to college and receiving degrees and fashioning careers and providing for their family.

I hope she is surrounded by memories of her children and grandchildren and her great-grandson. I hope their voices and laughter and presence fill her heart.

I hope she is lost in the love which surrounds her.

Frailty

This past week I visited my mother.
She is 88, has fallen several times in the last six months and is now learning to walk with a cane (which she thinks she really doesn’t need, but she does.) I am glad for the time we had together, but it is hard to watch her when she looks and is so frail. Just behind the person who now struggles to get out of her chair is a woman who was the Valedictorian of her high school class and who, having never been on a plane before, flew to Alaska to marry my Father who was stationed in Anchorage during the Korean War. She raised three sons who are just four years apart in age, and because I am one of them I know that was not always an easy task. She went to college after my Dad got his degree and then taught school for more than 20 years and, with my Father, danced her way through retirement. All of that and more is still there, but hidden now.

Being with her also reminds me of my own aging and mortality.
I don’t yet need a cane, but some of those things which once came so easily are harder now. I look at my Mom and see myself in 20 years which today feels like only a moment away. What will it be like for me and for those whom I love? I hope for more than what will probably be possible, but one thing I do know. I know I will be as stubborn as my Mom is now. I have already apologized to my sons.

Tags

Several things I believe: