Dealing with the Mortality of my Parents:
I’ve held off on writing this down, even in a blog that no one reads, for a simple reason. I just don’t like thinking about the idea of my parents dying. I have no children of my own, and I’ve alienated myself from my sister-in-law badly enough that I never get to see my brother’s son, my nephew. I have a small circle of friends in my life, small enough that I’ll include my dog and my therapist in the official count in order not to look too pathetic.
The point is that I don’t want my parents to die, and yet I know they must. Both of my parents are, in their own way, responsible for this path I’ve charted through life as a writer, which, come to think of it, may be a good enough reason to wish ill on both of them. My mother is an Irish-Protestant girl from the Deep South, who took advantage of the initiatives offered by the Great Society to get a first-class education and escape the cotton mills that claimed the lives and lungs of her mother and father. My own dad is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in New York’s Lower East Side before migrating to Memphis, Tennessee. There his father worked as an accountant. My father became a Freudian psychiatrist.
My mother is something like sixty-nine or seventy years old. She still smokes, takes a pharmacopeia of pills, and is constantly at the prestigious Mayo Clinic for a battery of tests and results whose specifics she has never really let me in on. I talk with her daily on the phone, mostly about poetry and literature, and sometimes about life in general.
My father, on the other hand, gave up cigarettes some time ago, got on an exercise regimen, and worries daily and vociferously about his own death. His wife is a decade older than him (roughly eighty years old) and he likes to joke that he robbed the cradle instead of the grave. More seriously, he’s confessed that after she dies he’d like to move into the property my brother and I cohabit, which is his and for which I pay rent.
“I’m realistic,” he said, of his girlfriend, “and I know she could die any day.”
My reply was maybe harsh, but we don’t bullshit each other too much. “So, could you.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to live forever.” He meant it, in spite of the fact that he is a medical doctor who is seventy, who has diabetes and had two open heart surgeries. More recently he had a “minor” surgery at which I was present, because I had to drive him home from the hospital.
It is strange to sit in a room with one’s father while a young woman explains the pain he is going to feel as she inserts a catheter into his penis. Ageing is very serious business, dying even moreso. Both processes are unavoidable, unless you talk to the science fiction writer, Ben Bova, who argues that all we have to do is essentially rewrite our “death dates” as they’re programmed (as such) in our telomeres, in order to extend life perhaps indefinitely. That said, not even the wildest speculation is really up to the challenge of describing what catheterizing a five-hundred-year-old penis might look like.
What explains my mother’s equipoise regarding the cold fact of her own death, and my father’s reluctance to come to grips with the truth of mortality? Some of it can be put down to the residual traces of their own religious weltanschauungs. Neither my mother or father were especially religious or observant (they wouldn’t have married if they were) but Christianity puts a much greater premium on the quality and reality of the afterlife than Judaism, which, aside from some obscure and Kabbalistic minor pronouncements, seems to think that when you die you’re kosher worm food.
Both of my parents are Baby Boomers, which means that regardless of what their avowed religion is, they believe in a host of ideas and pieties whose credibility is presently under heavy strain. Their generation, more than any that came before or after, thought that the human condition, especially as regards race and poverty, could be solved, and that the only thing barring the solution was bad people. I don’t think either one of them really believes this anymore.
Still, if the fires don’t burn, perhaps the embers smolder, at least in some figurative respects.
The other day I was listening to The Doors’ song Five to One. As with most of their output, if you think too much about Jim Morrison or what “the Lizard King” thought of himself, it can all become a bit insufferable. Morrison, as Roger Ebert said in his review of Oliver Stone’s film about the band, is a bit of a drag and also a second-rate poet.
No group from the sixties could have ever credibly led a revolution, but their revolutionary posturing did make for some great pop music. View The Doors that way ---and remember that contrary to the pronouncements of the airheaded photojournalist in the movie that Jim Morrison wasn’t The Doors, at least not without Robby Krieger’s flamenco-inspired guitar playing and Ray Manzarek’s otherworldly powers on the keyboard- and the music can be enjoyable.
Still the lyrics can be pretty stupid. “The old get old and the young get stronger.” This isn’t quite true. The old are already old, and they merely get older and die. The young get stronger for a while, then they also get old, and older, and then die.
I think my mother and father’s generation forgot this.
An old Greek saying has it that a healthy society is one in which the young plant trees in whose shadow they will never stand. The Boomers seemed to take the opposite tact, and behaved like cultural lumberjacks, going through the woods and hacking down sturdy redwoods from the past and making solipsistic pronouncements about their own genius rather than having the decency to even shout “Timber!” to warn their children of what was going to come down on their heads as a result of their own folly.
One day upon leaving the hospital with my father (on a previous visit, maybe for an epidural) I was holding him as he stumbled dizzily through the corridor, helping to guide him to the elevator.
I didn’t want to needle him too badly, but I had to ask, “How could you guys say something like ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty-five? You knew you’d eventually get older, right?’”
“No,” he responded as we wandered to the elevator. “No, we didn’t.”
I’m thirty-six now, and sometimes and in some ways feel like both of my parents are younger than me. I just wish there was a way for me to give them some of the years from my own life to add to theirs, as a proverb from another land has it. Maybe Japan.
The point is that I don’t want my parents to die, and yet I know they must. Both of my parents are, in their own way, responsible for this path I’ve charted through life as a writer, which, come to think of it, may be a good enough reason to wish ill on both of them. My mother is an Irish-Protestant girl from the Deep South, who took advantage of the initiatives offered by the Great Society to get a first-class education and escape the cotton mills that claimed the lives and lungs of her mother and father. My own dad is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in New York’s Lower East Side before migrating to Memphis, Tennessee. There his father worked as an accountant. My father became a Freudian psychiatrist.
My mother is something like sixty-nine or seventy years old. She still smokes, takes a pharmacopeia of pills, and is constantly at the prestigious Mayo Clinic for a battery of tests and results whose specifics she has never really let me in on. I talk with her daily on the phone, mostly about poetry and literature, and sometimes about life in general.
My father, on the other hand, gave up cigarettes some time ago, got on an exercise regimen, and worries daily and vociferously about his own death. His wife is a decade older than him (roughly eighty years old) and he likes to joke that he robbed the cradle instead of the grave. More seriously, he’s confessed that after she dies he’d like to move into the property my brother and I cohabit, which is his and for which I pay rent.
“I’m realistic,” he said, of his girlfriend, “and I know she could die any day.”
My reply was maybe harsh, but we don’t bullshit each other too much. “So, could you.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to live forever.” He meant it, in spite of the fact that he is a medical doctor who is seventy, who has diabetes and had two open heart surgeries. More recently he had a “minor” surgery at which I was present, because I had to drive him home from the hospital.
It is strange to sit in a room with one’s father while a young woman explains the pain he is going to feel as she inserts a catheter into his penis. Ageing is very serious business, dying even moreso. Both processes are unavoidable, unless you talk to the science fiction writer, Ben Bova, who argues that all we have to do is essentially rewrite our “death dates” as they’re programmed (as such) in our telomeres, in order to extend life perhaps indefinitely. That said, not even the wildest speculation is really up to the challenge of describing what catheterizing a five-hundred-year-old penis might look like.
What explains my mother’s equipoise regarding the cold fact of her own death, and my father’s reluctance to come to grips with the truth of mortality? Some of it can be put down to the residual traces of their own religious weltanschauungs. Neither my mother or father were especially religious or observant (they wouldn’t have married if they were) but Christianity puts a much greater premium on the quality and reality of the afterlife than Judaism, which, aside from some obscure and Kabbalistic minor pronouncements, seems to think that when you die you’re kosher worm food.
Both of my parents are Baby Boomers, which means that regardless of what their avowed religion is, they believe in a host of ideas and pieties whose credibility is presently under heavy strain. Their generation, more than any that came before or after, thought that the human condition, especially as regards race and poverty, could be solved, and that the only thing barring the solution was bad people. I don’t think either one of them really believes this anymore.
Still, if the fires don’t burn, perhaps the embers smolder, at least in some figurative respects.
The other day I was listening to The Doors’ song Five to One. As with most of their output, if you think too much about Jim Morrison or what “the Lizard King” thought of himself, it can all become a bit insufferable. Morrison, as Roger Ebert said in his review of Oliver Stone’s film about the band, is a bit of a drag and also a second-rate poet.
No group from the sixties could have ever credibly led a revolution, but their revolutionary posturing did make for some great pop music. View The Doors that way ---and remember that contrary to the pronouncements of the airheaded photojournalist in the movie that Jim Morrison wasn’t The Doors, at least not without Robby Krieger’s flamenco-inspired guitar playing and Ray Manzarek’s otherworldly powers on the keyboard- and the music can be enjoyable.
Still the lyrics can be pretty stupid. “The old get old and the young get stronger.” This isn’t quite true. The old are already old, and they merely get older and die. The young get stronger for a while, then they also get old, and older, and then die.
I think my mother and father’s generation forgot this.
An old Greek saying has it that a healthy society is one in which the young plant trees in whose shadow they will never stand. The Boomers seemed to take the opposite tact, and behaved like cultural lumberjacks, going through the woods and hacking down sturdy redwoods from the past and making solipsistic pronouncements about their own genius rather than having the decency to even shout “Timber!” to warn their children of what was going to come down on their heads as a result of their own folly.
One day upon leaving the hospital with my father (on a previous visit, maybe for an epidural) I was holding him as he stumbled dizzily through the corridor, helping to guide him to the elevator.
I didn’t want to needle him too badly, but I had to ask, “How could you guys say something like ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty-five? You knew you’d eventually get older, right?’”
“No,” he responded as we wandered to the elevator. “No, we didn’t.”
I’m thirty-six now, and sometimes and in some ways feel like both of my parents are younger than me. I just wish there was a way for me to give them some of the years from my own life to add to theirs, as a proverb from another land has it. Maybe Japan.
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