Is This What Aging Really Means, Losing All The People You Loved?

Here’s the short answer. Yes. But there’s a longer answer that took me years to understand.

When the phone rings at 2 AM it’s never going to be good news.

I bolt awake, heart racing. See my sister’s number on the call display. I’m already crying when I pick up. I’m so sorry sis, she whispers.

It’s still dark when we race to the hospital, my child and I. The streets are dark and empty and it’s cold outside. So cold. It seems fitting.

We drive through the parkade, up and down the rows, up and down ramps and levels, looking for somewhere to park. Fumble for coins to feed the machine, put the permit on the dash, hunt for the elevator.

And then we’re all there. Siblings and spouses and our kids hugging and crying and there’s so many of us she won’t have to spend even one single minute alone for the three entire days she will fight for her life.

As we leave the hospital for the last time, Silver Bells is playing in the hallways. I go home and cry myself to sleep.

I wake up and it’s still dark out. I hear mommy singing.

Where are you going, my little one, little one. Where are you going, my baby, my own?

He’s not her own, but she doesn’t care. They were foster parents, mom and dad, an emergency shelter for babies scooped out of dire circumstance and placed into mom’s loving arms.

A nice lady with flowered dresses and thick black shoes would show up carrying babies and mom would scoop them up, one after the other, kissing little heads and saying you poor little thing, come to me.

Tucked in my blankets, I know mama’s wearing her white bathrobe with tiny pink roses that daddy bought her at Christmas. Walking around and around the kitchen, rocking and singing, nevermind the time.

Her voice is sweet and clear. I close my eyes and fall back to sleep.

Let me tell you something about my Baba. I knew when she fell. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I was in school, writing in my notebook when my head shot up. Baba’s hurt, I blurted.

Sweetie, your Baba is fine, teacher said. No, she’s not, I said. So I ran like the wind all the way home. All by myself. Didn’t even wait for my sister.

Two blocks away I turned the corner and saw the ambulance. Baba was on a stretcher, holding the door of the ambulance, watching down the street. Our eyes met. I don’t know what it means that I knew, or that she knew I knew but it gives me goosebumps to this very day.

It’s a beautiful summer day and we pull off the gravel road and bumpety bump onto the grass by the cemetery. We get out and the sun kisses my arms and the wind blows flyaway hair warm against my face.

On the right is a big old foundation with three steps leading up to it.

I climb and sit. It’s where the old church was, before it burned down. It’s where my dad met mom at a dance. Where they carried me, wearing the same little white christening gown four siblings wore before me.

Together, we walk the rows, my child and I, sprinkling peony petals on the graves of the people I loved. I can still hear them, so many of us packed in mama’s house. Talking, laughing, too loud in more than one language.

One by one, they left. Baba and grandpapa. Aunts and uncles. Finally, we kneel and put peonies on Dad’s grave. He loved flowers so much we bring them in bundles. Take care of mom, I whisper.

We stand up and look around. The cemetery is filled with petals fluttering in the breeze like so many pink butterflies and I can’t help but wonder.

Is this what aging really means, losing all the people you loved?

Here’s the short answer. Yes.

A month before Dad left us, we sat in the sun talking and drinking coffee. He said it was hard to bury his brothers, one by one. I’m the last of us, he said. But I’ll take every minute I’m given, he said and I nodded.

The night before mama had a stroke, I had a bad dream.

We’d talked on the phone for hours. About everything and nothing like mothers and daughters do if they’re lucky. Slowly, the sky outside my window grew dark. Finally, tired, she was ready for bed.

I love you sweetheart, she said.

I know you do momma, I love you too, I said. So, so much.

Then I went to bed and had a dark and dystopian dream where I was being forcibly taken to Sartre and I didn’t want to go. Holding mama’s hand in the dream, crying. I don’t want to go, mama, I’m scared I’ll never see you again. Mama crying please don’t go. Then they took me.

I bolted awake and couldn’t remember anything but that one little bit and I didn’t know what it meant because Sartre is a person, not a place.

Jean Paul Sartre. Literary magnifique. French philosopher and one of the first to write of existentialism and existential angst and I wondered what it meant for my mind to superimpose his name upon a place.

Many moons later, after the crying and the cremation I opened a browser and ran down a rabbit hole, reading the works of a man born nearly a century ago. And I found it. Here’s what he said.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

Here’s what I thought of. My dad’s baby sister. Gone at two, robbed of her whole life by tragic illness. A tiny blonde angel, too young to have known despair or loss, pink petals fluttering like butterflies on her grave.

Aging is a gift and the price of that gift is loss. It’s inevitable. The circle of life. But like my father before me, I’ll take every minute I’m given.

And sometimes, I’ll weep.

Hey, I’m Linda and you can read more of my stories here.