What Do You Want as Memories When You Are 95?

GiaB writing prompt #2–2 time

Your grandpa fell in the closet. I can’t get him up. You better send your dad.

That is the call that woke me up one night while I was visiting my parents for the holidays a few years ago. It also served as a wake-up call for my life.

What do you want?

It seems like a simple question. But obviously, we need to be more specific. Does it mean what do I want for dinner? What do I want from my career? What do I want my legacy to be? This could go in so many directions.

I recently realized I’ve ignored this nagging question. I’ve been busy rushing through life doing what I should do; I have not really ever answered this layered question.

Even on the most surface level, what do I want for dinner? That is usually answered by convenience — the closest restaurant or the quickest thing to prepare at home? I don’t consider what I want my memories to be when I am ninety-five. When I recently sat down to have this serious conversation with myself, I drew a blank. I don’t know what I want.

On the cold, snowy evening when my family set out to help my grandpa up from his fall in the closet, an invaluable life lesson smacked me in the face.

My parents bundled my grandpa up and headed to the hospital. His shoulder was clearly dislocated. I stayed with my grandma. She was eighty-four at the time. We stayed up and talked until my parents returned from the hospital at two a.m. We talked about what she wanted.

She realized her husband of over sixty years was no longer safe living at home with her. He was prone to falling and her routine was to listen for him to fall and call someone to help him up. That was not effective, helpful, or safe.

They had decided when one of them needed to go into an assisted living facility, they would both go to the apartment-style accommodations. They offer different levels of care and assistance that would meet their needs until the end of their lives.

Now that the time had come, she was reconsidering. She felt obligated to stick to the plan but she didn’t feel ready to go to the facility. She said she still had things she wanted to do.

This brought many things into perspective for me. It also brought a question I had to ask.

What are the things you want to do, Gram?

The thing that stood out most to me was simply turning up her music. She explained that for most of her retired adult life, the news or some other show was their soundtrack on loop. My grandpa wasn’t interested in her music. She never got a chance to turn it up and enjoy it the way she would like to.

I am not at the same stage in my life, but there is a high likelihood that I will be in forty years. Life has been comfortable. Is there more? It really made me wonder and ask myself, what do I want?

We rush through life doing everything we should or being afraid of and avoiding some of the things we really want. By not taking the time to think about this, are we wasting time?

My feeling of having an abundance of time died that day. My grandfather died about six months later.

The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present. ― Alice Morse Earle

Almost two years have passed. My grandma asked me to help her pack up her house. She decided she is ready to move to the assisted living facility.

I still haven’t decided what I want in all aspects of my life, but I do know that I want my memories to be filled with an abundance of awe.

Thank you for reading! I hope everyone finds time on their side and makes the best of it always.

Thanks to Victor Sarkin at Genius in a Bottle (GiaB) for this prompt: Time

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