Losing your parents

Losing my father all-at-once, and my mother by degrees to dementia has been hellish.

My parents are in their mid-eighties so, you know, it’s just one of those things, but it seems like, no matter what the age, this is never just one of those things. Long expected deaths, or short sudden ones, like my father’s. It’s impossible to say which is worse, I guess, unless you’ve been around both.

Dear God, don’t let me have both. Though it looks like that is the direction we’re heading.

All this has produced a gap in fiction output. I know that Sheila Williams at Asimov’s will do her best to keep me in print should I get her stories worth publishing, but production schedules mean that I’ll have nothing in print in 2020 most likely, which is too bad, as 2020 is a seriously science-fictional year. At least, to people my age.

Story-telling, which compresses the creative act into a half day producing and performing a five minute bit, has become my substitute for the sustained mental effort of writing fiction. It resonates with the memoire work that I generated spontaneously as I processed all that paperwork.

And all that emotional stuff, too. Not that it’s fully processed. Or ever can be.

I wrote and illustrated a hundred pages about parents life in the 40s through the 60s. My mother’s illness meant all the paperwork, the nitty-gritty of coping with my father’s death, fell to me. And I felt an urgency to extract the stories that might soon be lost forever. Wanting to know my father, more, and better through her, and to escape the endless grinding estate work.

I am really really bad at paperwork. Well. I’m better at it now.

The memoire gathered a small but devoted readership in my FB feed. I may do something with it. Or maybe it’s therapy. I’ll give it some distance to figure that out.

There’s a lot of this dead parent content going around. It’s a generational thing; late boomers, early gen-x’ers parents are dropping like flies.

My parent’s, who had us a few years late by the standards at the time, were a generation known as the lost generation or, less popularly, The Lucky Few, a name they resented as they were born during the great depression.

” As it turned out, we really were very lucky,” as my Mom says.

A small cohort, they moved into job markets that welcomed them with open arms, and open wallets. Being white and educated, they benefited from post WW2 stuff, a GI bill, a booming housing market as the suburbs continued to sprawl, sucking middle class whites out of urban cores. Into that already fading suburban American dream, tracking the rise and fall of mall culture, the tail end of TV as king, phones as immobile objects, computers as props in SF movies or big business machines mailing you inscrutable bills.

My parents were professors. I staggered through my college years… tuition free.

I have been, and continue to be, wildly lucky.

But death has a way of leveling the emotional playing field. I’m a wreck. I feel so much so strongly now. Maybe it’s the bipolar. I struggle now for balance, composure, perspective. I flash back on the death bed, again and again, and long for a chance to really clear the air. Instead of clutching a still warm body ugly-crying out the things I’d never gotten to.

My mother slips away before my eyes and I struggle to remember her as she was, proud and intelligent and independent. A professional, a professor, an intellectual, always one of my best friends, a fact I only admit to myself as she becomes my charge. My responsibility.

My friend is mostly gone, and when I talk to her, really talk, dig deep, half the time there’s confusion in her eyes. She’s lost the thread. She fades in an out, like a ratio station receding from your speeding car on the interstate. Fuzzed with static, then clear, then unintelligible.

The strong, loving, flawed ever-s0-slightly distant, and beautiful people they were are gone for good.

I’m left spewing cliches. Life is precious. Time is limited. Say things while you can, and if I didn’t really listen then you won’t either. I can’t help but repeat them though, now, for you, wise and gentle reader. This reader that somehow I feel closer to than ever.

I feel closer to everyone now.

You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Other than that, there’s literally nothing to be afraid of. And eventually, if you do the work, maybe, you’re not even afraid of that. But I’m happier, in this sadness, knowing the first thing. I’m going to live as if my life matters.

I’ll get back to the writing. Or something even more important, and it will be full of writing stuff no doubt.

But for now…

If your family isn’t a toxic presence you have wisely cut yourself away from, give Mom and Dad a call. Say what you need to say. Now.

It can all change in an instant.

And you’ll wish you had.