It happened again yesterday. A friend e-mailed me to let me know that her
father-in-law had died. Two weeks before
that, another friend’s father died. Two
months before that another friend lost her mother. A year-and-a-half ago, my mother died.
They are falling like leaves these
members of my parents’ generation.
It started out slowly, in the way that
the first leaves drift slowly from an autumn tree. My father passed nearly twenty years
ago. Over the years since, several
friends have lost parents – I would hear of one and then, maybe a year later,
another.
But now the pace is rapid. The tree will soon be empty. There will be no one left of the generation
that gave birth to mine.
I am a Baby Boomer--one of the many babies
born during the hope-filled years following World War II: 1946-1964, to be precise. I was born during the first years of the boom,
and so I call myself a “vintage boomer.”
The members of my vintage cohort
will soon all be parentless.
Apart from the obvious individual grief
experienced by each person who loses a parent, this loss of a generation feels
momentous. Perhaps this is simply
because my generation is now the one standing between our children and history. Or perhaps it is because we lose so much when
we lose a generation.
With the passing of this generation, as
with each one before it, we lose not only its members, but their lived
experience. We can read about their
times, but we can never really know what it felt like to live them.* I have read many novels set during World War
II. And I have read non-fiction accounts
of those years. The novels give me some
sense of the experience, and the non-fiction works give me information, but
these are not my lived experiences. Once
those who lived them have passed, all we will have is history. And that is cold comfort, indeed.
And there is another loss. A friend whose mother died recently has told
me that she is trying to think about her mother before she got sick, before she
lost her memory, before she was diminished by the ravages of aging. This is a tricky business. If we have been caregivers to our parents,
the strongest and most recent memories are
of persons who could no longer care for themselves. We have to work to remember them as vital
people, fully occupying their lives.
And then there this—we probably never
really knew our parents as fully-realized beings, even when they were in their
prime. A line from Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, comes to mind. If I remember correctly—and it is possible
that I do not, given that I read the book years ago—someone asks the narrator something
about the narrator’s mother, who has
recently died. The narrator says (or
thinks?), “How would I know? She was my
mother.”
This is the rub. We do not grow up thinking of our parents,
who are then in their prime, as people with lives unrelated to our own. We know them only as “our parents.” We grow up, if all goes as it should, under
their care. They are the constants in
our lives. We do not give a lot of thought
to their hopes and dreams and losses and heartaches. They are simply there.
It is only much later, if ever, that we
attempt to pull together the
threads
of their lives, and to guess at the lived experience that each of these threads
represents. Although our attempts will
fall short of breathing life into our parents’ experiences, even the shadows of those
experiences are worthy of our attention.
And so, on this autumn day, I look out
my window at the falling leaves and think of the passing of my friend’s
father-in-law and of my other friend’s father, and of the many losses that
preceded those. And I pause to give
thanks for the gifts (not least of which is the gift of life) that each member
of my parents’ generation gave to mine.
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