The Silence of the Aged

Yesterday was Father’s Day.   Since my parents became less ambulatory, the holidays seem to be coming on with alarming rapidity.  We no sooner finished Easter than it was Mother’s Day; we took a breath, then it was Memorial Day.  Each holiday is nerve-wracking and emotion-fraught, as we watch my father stumble over each little crevice and my mother do her 3-point turn with her walker to get into my car.  My husband has revealed saintly qualities he somehow kept under wraps as he assists me in these transportings.  He is a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, and my mother is convinced that if anyone else helps her up the steps, she will fall to her death.  She exhibits a touching dependency on him, while still absolutely determined to do as much as possible by herself.  My father is the scarier figure.  He refuses all artificial aids for walking, doing a shuffle gait that is terrifying to watch.  His balance is so bad it’s a miracle he hasn’t bashed his head in.  He used to have a natural grace that made him an excellent dancer, and maybe that is what is saving him now.

We all want to get them out of their Assisted Living suite as much as we can, but the holidays have become draining.  Yet, as draining as they are for us, they seem to be doubly so for them.  My father was always a quiet man, quick to laugh at a joke, but  now not really able to quip like he used to.  My mother was the lively one, full of stories about her past life in Iran, always interested in everything the kids were doing.  But now that her world has become so small, and she feels so out of touch with the rest of the world, that storyteller that we used to think had exhausted all of us with her tales of the Mideast is curiously silent.  I watched them yesterday and for the first time they seemed to be not quite with us anymore.  They couldn’t really relate to much of what was being said, the kids’  quick humor going over their heads most of the time.  They looked pale and almost ghostly to me.  After my older son and I took them back to their residence and we drove away, I felt a tear trickle down my cheek and cursed myself silently for dreading the day as I had.  What would it be like when I no longer had them in the room?  As difficult as it was to get them in and out of the house, what would it be like when I no longer had them to worry about?

I wondered, too, about how quiet they had both become, how seemingly removed from the festivities.  Is that the first step out of this world and into the next?  I hope not, because I know that as tough as it is now, it will be unbearably painful then.

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