When my father died at just 65 from lung cancer, friends and acquaintances often responded to the news with, Was he a smoker? They almost seemed to be saying, well, What did you expect?
That’s not unlike the response I’d gotten when discussing my mother’s deteriorating health before her recent death. No, she wasn’t a smoker. But she was 94, and, once again, I sense that silent, well, What did you expect?
Of course, by any measure, 94 is a ripe old age. And anyone who’s made it that far has likely led a rather full life. My mother certainly had.
But I resent the implication that because a person has lasted so long and lived so much, her survivors’ sense of loss should somehow be less intense. Ironically, I think it’s precisely because my mom had lived nearly a century that I’ll feel her loss so keenly. After all, I’m just now getting to know a world without her, and my seventh decade is nigh. That’s a lot of bonding time.
In joking about growing older during a stand-up comedy act I used to do, I said that rather than lie about your age, lie about you mother’s age. “Tell people she just turned 65, then watch them squint as they grapple with the math in their heads.”
Our parents, like ourselves, knew a time when mortality was just a word and not a knock at any door nearby. When first we acknowledged it, we surely declared that 80, 90, heck, even 100 would be fine, as long as we still had our health. And then time teaches us—as so much else in a long life does—that the easy declarations of youth don’t always stand a chance against the determined realities of middle and old age.
For her part, my mother vowed repeatedly in her 60s and 70s and, yes, 80s, that’s she’d never spend her final days in a nursing home. But, alas, that’s precisely where she’d lived for nearly the past two years. And, only half jokingly, she made it clear that “the minute” her health failed, she would end it all with a “black pill.” Yet among the many pills required to stay the illnesses she battled, none contained the mythic powers of that infamous black one.
So with the help of her children, other relatives, friends and a nursing-home staff worthy of sainthood, my mom found that even with reduced mobility, diminished appetite and shortened breath, life might still have dignity, certainly laughter and, occasionally, the joy of something as simple as signing out to go for a ride with one of her children.
She leaves us—her congestive heart failure finally too much for her small frame and outsize will—showing that some things about a person never change, age and overpowering fatigue be damned. Ever self-effacing about what she deemed a prominent nose (I’ve always found it elegant), Mom recently summoned the strength to jokingly ask a nurse where she’d found an oxygen tube long enough for her.
Though all my siblings are able wordsmiths, as the official family writer, I’ll be expected to speak at my mom’s upcoming memorial. Some might assume, well, now, you’ve had a lot of time to think about what you’ll say. Au contraire. Through all manner of challenges, including major back surgery and cancer—in her 80s!—Mom has gone on. She has always gone on. That’s what she did. It wasn’t a pattern that prompted regular thoughts of eulogies.
But she was 94, I hear people thinking, What did you expect?
What did I expect? Maybe 95.
ThirdAge contributor Jim Brosseau is working on a book about modern-day civility.
