Writing about my parents–or my own observance of their aging, thresholds of their own–is a complicated matter, to be sure. Perhaps too many words. Or words that have taken on much less flavor than once they had. Given we are Midwesterners in my family, unaccustomed to much spiciness, perhaps that’s the best, eh? The last 10-15 years have been the most complicated ones for me with respect to my folks. My spiritual proclivities and callings diverging so clearly from their own. Or my perception of their refusal to grow spiritually, emotionally. The first is the intellectual frame; the second is the wounded emotional one. I love my folks dearly. They offered me precisely the childhood and young adulthood that my soul needed. I want nothing but what’s best for their own journey(s), into their own choices. All underlaid with a deep sense of grief and feeling largely unseen, unheard, most of my life, amidst their devotion to religious tradition(s), my father’s family-ethos (and refusal to feel), pride.
Beginning with this “now”...? I find myself a blessed daughter, given my folks were quite forward-thinking in their own later-life-care-decisions. I have cousins who are just entering the challenges of later-life care with proud German-American parents/fathers, or tender-hearted ones unwilling to challenge the strong-willedness of his wife, their stepmother/aunt. These cousins are struggling a bit, to both discern what is loving and what is necessary. In quite unexpected (at the time) fashion, my folks chose to move across the country, to Portland, Oregon, about 6 months before their eightieth birthdays. My father’s brother, Dale, chose a beautiful CCRC (Continuous Care Retirement Community) and urged his brother, both my folks, to come join him (and his wife, Bette). The timing of this choice has always struck me as significant–more about that below–but it meant that I have absolutely no guilt or regret about living elsewhere than my folks. So many here in Ohio lament that their children have moved away, to larger cities, better work, etc. My folks were the ones to abandon me, so to choose their new life in Oregon. I’m convinced they ‘bought’ themselves another decade, at least, in such a choice. I’m really happy for them.
We laugh today at how my own assumptions led me to be so surprised, and not a little irked. Being the good daughter, taking care of my aging parents, was going to be my ticket out of United, my ability to retire early, tend to family. Then they up and deserted me for their new life out there. I’ve teased them about that, using a “how dare you” kind of tone. They were shocked with the presumption on my part, and I now see how proud they are. They would never have withstood my caring for them with such intimacy as they age. Hesses are such proud people. Yes, me included. 🙂
The timing for their choice has always struck me as significant, though I’d never broach the subject or share my observation with them. They chose to leave the Dayton area at nearly the height of the Troubles, as I call them. My refusals to buffer their marriage anymore. My ‘growing up’ and differentiating into a more whole Feminine within me, my body. This movement utterly terrified them, given their own ancestral wounds and inabilities to know emotional growth, inner work. One time of coffee with my mom, when I overtly refused to pick up her emotional venting, her grief, she said to me, utterly void of any emotion: “Well, I guess you’re dead to me then.” No daughter ever truly recovers from such a statement, sensation, though I took it in stride then and denied it to her face. “Clearly I’m not, because here I sit.” She and I have never talked about it, and I’m sure she’d not remember it today. My folks have triangulated in power-over ways with me in my marriage, attempting to ally with Brian against me or manipulate connection with him at expense of my own. Sure sign of ancestral wound, safety only in competitive connection with the male of the family. At one point, at the height of the Troubles, the statement was (whether from Mom or Dad, I don’t remember, as they work(ed) as a unit): “Lisa has grown so strange, we wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted a divorce.” When this came out in a couples’ therapy session with Brian, during this time, I physically withdrew, stunned and hurt. [One strange assurance in this morbid tale is that Brian’s an attorney, if inactive in terms of the Board. His memory for court-cases, or in this case, for his own emotional alliances, I trust wholeheartedly. I have no doubt that my folks would say something like that to him, then.] So, my folks’ fears were a painful weapon in my own maturation into who I am today.
It was amidst this climate that my folks all of a sudden chose to put their names on the list for the Holladay Park Plaza, the CCRC where Dale & Bette were living. They left in 2019, and made it into their apartment 30 days before Covid lockdown. Now that we have moved past the Troubles, if not really through them toward healing, none of us touches the tender strands of that time in our lives. I don’t observe aloud my awareness of what they were getting away from (me, facing their own fears, incapacities). No point that I can imagine. I do attempt to celebrate that they have landed in a place good for them, extending their lives into new relationships, a larger community within which to belong, beautiful settings and long-term care.
Brian was quick to summarize when we got home from my birthday dinner–which they chose to tell me they were going to move to Portland, making my celebration all about them instead…classic move by my folks: “You realize this means you won’t be with them when they die…?” I startled at this bluntness, but it is how he deals with sensitive emotional things. “You’re probably right,” I must have said, “yet no one knows when or how anyway. It will be as it will be.” It has arisen in my memory several times over these last years, of course, making me wonder whether I’ve already grieved the loss of my parents in some substantial way. Or I regularly grieve their loss, even as I attempt to welcome what connection does remain between us.
In our (mostly) weekly Zoom calls, we maintain a connect that seems to please them, satisfy their needs. I sometimes feel like I don’t even need to be there, however. I dance a thin line between sharing my life with them and simply giving glimpses of things that might trigger their fears, their refusals to see me as I am. I try to get out there to visit 1-2 times a year, once “just me” for a couple days, and once both Brian and me. Our plan is to visit them this summer, late July, when we visit with them for 2-3 days, then go to the coast with my cousin, Dan, and his wife Veronica, with whom Brian and I are close (enough). Then we come back for 1-2 days with my folks before flying back home. My folks surprised me by flying back to Ohio in November 2024, for Brian’s 10-year anniversary celebration with his church. I’m glad they came, even though it was like a wedding when the happy couple can never spend any real time with everybody.
Even from this distance, I notice the little things going–memory, short-term especially; physical capacity (my mom, especially); narrowing worlds… They have been huge civically-involved supporters of local city life, so are tipping toward clinical depression with what’s happening in the States. They’ve created their sense of safety in the world by serving, leading in their ways, and now it looks like it’s all been for nothing.
I practice bowing to their experience(s), their sadnesses, while working hard not to buffer, pick them up, pretend I can have any impact in their lives like that. Hard for a “parentified daughter” whose visceral reality is connecting safety with shame. When I feel shame, they must care for me is the sick version of this, but what I grew up with. What they grew up with. As they’ve watched my own freedom grow, strengthen, they get curious sometimes. Maybe a bit envious. But I doubt enough to be able to change eight decades of life’s habits. But who knows? I surely don’t, speaking with them by Zoom an hour a week.
I spend my efforts attempting to encourage my mother in her own ways, habits, hobbies–needlework, she loves, as well as knitting, etc. We share delights in jigsaw puzzles and sharing the family news, whatever direction it may be coming–them to us, us to them. I spend effort in encouraging my dad’s old and new loves–scripture, tradition (old) but also poetry now (quite new). Moving there, getting outside his own identity as physician and uber-elder in the Presbyterian Church, Dad has discovered the emotional happening that poetry can be. He seems to be continuing to grow, to get curious about things, to see more. I know he has fears about how Mom is growing more and more insular, never needing to leave the apartment if she can help it. He’s much more the extrovert, we’re finding, which counters the narrative of most of their life together. But he was swamped with personal connection and contact as a physician, so would come home needing solitude, silence, time with his family. Now I see him reaching outside himself a whole lot more for the kind of connections he needs, alongside Mom or on his own.
Overall, I think I have already grieved the loss of my mother, for all intents and purposes. I stay connected to Mom in the ways she is able while recognizing that all those yearnings I’ve lived with will never be met by her. Perhaps could never have been met by her, which is what drove me to my sacred work in the world. I don’t hold this as some divine plan, but I do hold it as making beautiful lemonade out of the lemons I inherited. I spent years lamenting all my mother could never offer me–connection to my own body, love of my physical form, deep intimacies with another–all while feeling a deep belly sadness for all she must have survived simply to survive as she did. Her dissociation from her own body happened way before I arrived, after all. Doesn’t (and did not) have anything to do with me. And now I know to be care-full around women whose relationship with their mother was/is visceral, affectionate, loving of body, curious of the world. Without my own awareness activated and bounded, I’ve landed in deep attachments with potential of harming me or the other (usually a ‘her). Those attachments have healed so very much in me, AND it’s been costly for those who companioned me. (Even as I trust it’s been providential and healing for them too…that’s how attachment works, after all). The grief I will feel when my mother’s body dies is something I cannot imagine, though I know it will come–heavy or light, known or only eventually discovered as I go. I have wondered whether my relationship with Mom will be easier, once she’s on the ancestral plane? I’m hopeful there…
In some ways, I’ve grieved the loss of my father as well, though his death will probably impact me much more. He and I had a deep closeness for most of my young life. Probably too close, given it limited my willingness to risk relationships with my peers until I was in my late 20’s. He and two of his brothers were my emotional home, which made sense I’d land in higher education then. Differentiating from Dad happened earlier, in my late-20’s, as I learned family-of-origin patterns, as I began to learn my life was different from his, from theirs. That my own body’s sensations were not shame-ful, even though in a woman’s body. He knew not how to handle my becoming a conscious feminine woman, so mostly hid behind my mother, who was furious, felt abandoned (or so I imagine today). As was healthier, they became an emotional unit, more important than the one I had had as primary with my father. I grieved the loss of that centrality, but also breathed in the oxygen I needed to become more who I am. Ever since The Troubles, then, Dad and I have tried to dance a connection we share while not disturbing Mom’s insecurities. Sometimes it’s simply too much effort. So I’ve grieved the loss of that connection, in various ways. Relief that the dysfunction of entanglement-for-safety is no longer necessary. Pleasure in watching his delight in his life out in Portland, the little-boy glee he sometimes shares when he gets to share a poem with a resident or a movie with floor-neighbors.
All of this is complicated more recently as “end of life decisions” have had to be made, signed, shared across the family web. Dad shared their will&testament with Brian, who will basically be the executor of the estate when they die. My folks’ values–the choices they have made bequeathing inheritance–differ from Brian’s, so he’s furious with them, feeling they are once again not valuing or honoring me in who I am. I don’t know the details–don’t need to know them–but I watch it play out in subterranean ways–Brian’s withdrawal from them, sharing any space with them on Zoom, his fierceness for me which can lean toward disrespect of them, which incites my own family loyalty…etc. Blah blah blah. 🙂All in all, Brian and I have saved ferociously, knowing we decided not to have children, so I’m not concerned about the money, the inheritance or not. I trust we’ll be fine, and anger’s too heavy to carry for such things. But Brian will have to do his own work with that–or not… Not my journey, even if it is my circus, and arguably, my monkeys. 🙂
Time to jump in the shower, heading into the high-holy-day that today is (Maundy Thursday). I knew I wanted to–needed to–come to some speech about all this, even as I hold both lament and love side by side. I wish so much more for my folks–more peace, more ease, more intimacy–even as I know they are making precisely the choices they are able to make, want to make, that don’t prioritize those things. I don’t have regrets about this journey, though the sadness is never very far away. I’m coming to accept that my ancestral woundedness will never truly heal, and that’s as it needs to be. I will always yearn to be seen and heard more deeply than seems available to me, and I will avoid risking into those gifts, for fear of losing my own safety, security. Except glimpses and daring still come, reminding me life is not done until it’s done. There’s always a new opportunity to risk deeper love, deeper connection. It’s not all on me, but I do have to–get to–co-create, participate in it all.
My ‘baba-yaga’ in the woods, Susan, gave me the best framework to hold all this for me. She observed that when it was time for my parents to incarnate, each chose their path so to serve their soul’s path, with impact for my own growth, maturation, resilience, delight. I would not be who I am today, or have offered the work I am offering today, but for their incapacities as much as their capacities, conscious intentions. I am grateful, in the end. I do love my family, quirks and hurts and all.
