Middle Age Is When You Are in the Middle of Those Leaving, and Those Arriving

Catherine and Benjamin

A note from a life-changing summer.

The last of my grandparents, my maternal grandmother, Catherine, is fading away. I don’t know if she will last until I, too, become a grandparent later this year. Her tiny frame shrinks a little more each day, her grasp on time and place as shaky as her fingers trying to take hold of a coffee cup. She’s 93 and so restless she won’t stay in her room at the nursing home, setting out in her wheelchair at all hours or thinking that she just got back from another town some distance away.

I can’t blame her. If I was in her place and had a single thought, it would be, “What am I doing here?” I don’t know that I could shake the sense that I belonged someplace else, someplace I couldn’t quite remember, or someplace I had heard about, or someplace just a little bit beyond the hazy cloud wall in my mind, someplace…just …not here.

My mother holds her mother’s hand, and holds her own breath. Holds the memories of all that has been, holds off the thoughts of what will be.

When we are babies our parents hold us, carry us, anticipate our needs for rest, for food, for a change because we have no words for what bothers us. When dissatisfied or frightened, we wail, and our parents make comforting noises.

Long years later, the children sit and anticipate the needs of the parent, who may have the means to speak, even if it is only to ask “Why?” and the response, again, is comforting noises.

I don’t know “why”. I wish I did. Or perhaps I don’t. But at some point in the next few months, I know I will lean over a crib and say, “Sh-sh-sh-sh, it’s all right.”

And someday, I will look into a young pair of eyes and say, “Would you like to hear a story?”