“They say you need to give your children roots and wings to thrive, and we are lucky that our kids have had all four grandparents to give them both. The oldest, Pop, will be 90 years old in November, and grandma, the youngest, my mom, turned 80 this year. We count every day with them as a treasure not to be taken for granted. We understand that more than anything else, the gift of time that they have been able to give to our children is one that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.”
This is an excerpt from one of my columns last year. Sadly, Pop did not live to see his 90th birthday; he passed away on September 8, just six weeks shy of that milestone.
The coming anniversary of Pop’s death is very much top of mind as we prepare to head to Pennsylvania this weekend for our annual Brossman family reunion at the bungalow outside Allentown. It was canceled last year because Pop had just taken a fall, and it was the beginning of his swift decline toward the end. It has been a year of the first “withouts” — that 90th birthday that came and went without him enjoying his coconut cake, that first Thanksgiving where he wasn’t at the table to share in the bounty, that first Christmas where we hung the ornaments and his absence was a presence in the otherwise festive room.
The most notable without Pop moment happened in the spring, when our niece gave birth to his first great-grandchild. He would have been thrilled to meet little Hailey, the leading edge of the next generation, and he only missed her by six months.
My mother-in-law has been living on her own in that big, rambling ranch, and doing a fine job of it, she says, but I would have to think there would be huge moments of overwhelming silence and loneliness. Her days are filled with painting and friends, and she has become quite a sports aficionado, following tennis avidly as Pop used to do, and tuning in to his favorite Philadelphia-area teams. She says the nights are the quietest and the hardest; after almost 60 years with that constant in your life, how could it not be so?
She is way more up-to-date on her computer and smartphone skills than most in her age group, and she has several games of Words with Friends going on at any given time, including two with me right now.
It’s comforting to me when she plays a round back, because I know she’s there and okay. This was especially useful over the winter months, when I would worry that she might slip and fall on the walkway between her house and garage studio. I always try to play a round just before bed, and then am comforted when she responds, because I know she’s there and safe.
She wants to live in her home, and as long as she’s healthy, it’s the right thing to do. I just worry what will happen when she’s no longer able to be independent. That’s a bridge that we will cross when we have to, but for many of my baby boomer friends, that time is now.
My parents are a case in point. They continue to live in the five-bedroom house they’ve inhabited for the last 30 years, even though my father can barely walk up the steps. He’s been advocating downsizing and moving to a much more manageable condo for a long time, but my mother insists on staying where the air is fresh, and the space is wide open. She loves her privacy and the big kitchen where she can cook up an aromatic Korean storm without worrying about bothering neighbors with the pungency.
I am torn between letting them be — which has been my M.O. to date — and insisting they move to quarters that are more suitable for them at their age and health. Some of you may remember a column from earlier this year where I explained how I had to dig them out of their driveway, trapped as they were by snow and ice. They had insisted they were fine, but when I went to check on them, I found out otherwise. This is one of the characteristics of age, I suppose, to live in a state of denial about the kinds of things you no longer can do.
I’m thinking about my good friend as I write this, whose parents are both in an assisted living facility, because she wishes she had been more insistent that her parents move out of their large house, and her father to stop driving. It turns out that her dad, about the same age as mine, had been in a number of car accidents that he had hidden from his five children. The last accident put both her parents in the hospital, her dad with a traumatic brain injury that still affects his clarity today. I know she wrestles with the should haves and could haves, but she really had no choice in forcing him to do something he didn’t want to do.
Bill and I are nearing the end of the active child-rearing years — Will begins his junior year of high school next month — but we’ve already experienced the other end of the sandwich generation reality — elderly parents and helping to figure out what is best for their well-being and happiness. My mother-in-law did agree to getting a Life Alert Device (you know, the ones made famous on TV with the “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercial) and that does give us some peace of mind.
We all miss Pop very much and we will think of him as we gather underneath the giant trees for our traditional Pennsylvania Dutch picnic. And as we see the birds and the squirrels in the feeders he put out for them, in the straight lines of the house and the deck he loved so much, and in the faces of his grandchildren and now, great-grandchild, we will know he’s with us.
