FALLING LIKE LEAVES: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PASSING OF A GENERATION

         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.         

 *  I attempted to address this dilemma in an earlier post: My Mother Didn't Wear Make Up . . .or did she?

YOU HAD TO BE THERE (and you had to be young).

            I have read a couple of articles in the last few days about the baby boomer “fixation” on the death of John Kennedy.  I have read that we have highjacked the media and the public discourse for purposes of our annoying navel gazing.  It would seem that there are those who are ready for us to quit the scene.  Or to at least shut up and quit hogging the stage.  

            Fair enough.   If you are one of those who has had enough of boomers, this is your chance to turn away.  

            Here’s how I see it.    

            I don’t think that we are any more fixated on the Kennedy assassination than the “Greatest Generation” is on Pearl Harbor.  Speaking for myself, months, even years, go by when I barely give it a thought.  But this is a big anniversary, one that not only brings back memories but that reminds us that we are no longer young.    

            I admit that we baby boomers are a very large group, and that, by virtue of the size of our cohort, our interests and concerns dominated the public conversation for decades.  That focus, however, is a thing of the past.  I don’t even recognize many of the figures who turn up in the “news.”  Kim Kardashian – her wedding and then her divorce – showed up for weeks as the number-one headline in my Google news feed before I finally asked someone who she was.  The answer was not illuminating.  As near as I can tell, she is famous for being famous.  (So what generation cares about her and is subjecting me to these headlines?)  

            But, I digress.  

            I’m not going to bore you with a long description of where I was when I learned that Kennedy had been shot.  (9^th grade algebra class).  I am not going to assess his presidency or weigh in on conspiracy theories.  And I’m not going to belabor what everyone already knows:  The “60s” actually began in 1963 with the assassination, and ended with Nixon’s re-election in 1972.  

            Here’s what I want to talk about:  We were young, those of us who remember where we were and what we were doing on that terrifying day.  I was ten when John Kennedy was elected and just three days past my 14^th birthday when he died.  He was the first president I was conscious of.  

            We had grown up in the shadow of “The War” (WWII), but we had not yet become accustomed to watching wars being fought from our living rooms.  (That would come a very few years later with the Vietnam war).  The only people we had seen shot before our eyes were cowboys, and we knew that the blood wasn’t real.

            We had spent a week terrified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then we had gone back to our lives and the background dread of nuclear war and Nikita Krushchev.

            So, one minute we were watching Leave it to Beaver and being the kids that we were, and, the next minute the president was dead.  We all sat in front of our TV sets and watched the same news coverage for three days.  We didn’t go to school and many of our parents didn’t go to work.  We watched the shooting over and over again.  And then we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.  Over and over again.  We watched Lyndon Johnson take the oath of office on Air Force One. We watched the very tall Charles DeGaulle walk down Pennsylvania Avenue next to the very short Haile Selassie. We watched Jackie hold herself together, and we watched John John salute the casket.    

            Did I mention that we were young?  And that Kennedy was young? And that Jackie was even younger?  She was 34 when he died.  They had little children -- younger than my friends and I.  We had seen pictures of them in the Sunday supplements frolicking on the White House lawn.    

            The world was an orderly place.  And then it was not.    

            And then five years later, there were more deaths.—two more young men.  Men younger than most of our fathers  -- Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.    

            I think that the emotions come back on an anniversary like this, not because we were the only generation to ever face fear and confusion—we were not-- but because there is something about the combination of youth and traumatic events that imprints those events on the memory.  

            For Americans of my parents' generation, the traumatic event was Pearl Harbor.  For my mother, who grew up in Scotland, the traumatic memory is of being 20 years old and learning that Hitler had invaded Poland, and Great Britain was entering the war.  

            9/11 will likely be the traumatic event that stays with our children.  We adults will remember it in a different way – a way not tinged with the heightened emotions of youth.  

            So, we can imagine, sort of, what it was like to hear about Pearl Harbor, and those who are now younger than, say, 55 can imagine, kind of, what it must have felt like to live through the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination, but none of can us really know what the previous generation experienced.  

            So, bear with us boomers as we relive the events of 50 years ago.  The week will pass quickly, and there are tragedies enough to break the hearts of every generation.