“Marry an orphan,” my mother used to say, “and you can always come home for Christmas.” What she should have said: “Marry an orphan, or you’ll have four parents to nurse through every torment life doles out on the long, long path to the grave.” But I married the opposite of an orphan—the son and grandson of people who live deep into old age despite diseases that commonly fell others: cancer, sepsis, heart failure, emphysema, you name it. My husband’s elders get sick, and then they get sicker, but for years they persevere.
My own father died of cancer five days shy of his seventy-fifth birthday. Mom dropped dead of a hemorrhagic stroke at eighty. When I checked on her the night before her death, she was eating a cookie and watching a rerun of JAG. I almost pointed out that eating in bed is a choking hazard, but for once I let it go. She was in good health, but she needed my help in countless annoying ways—annoying to her and annoying to me—and she was heartily sick of being told what to do. I take some comfort now in knowing I skipped that one last chance to boss her around.
There’s an art to helping people without making them feel bad about needing help. It’s an art I was learning but hadn’t wholly mastered with Mom. “I would’ve died if my mother had done this to me when I was your age,” she said when she moved in across the street, but by the time she actually died three years later, we had both adjusted: “I know I can be a bitch sometimes, but you can be a bitch sometimes too,” she would say. “I figure it all works out in the wash.”
I saw my mother at least twice a day and talked with her more often than that. But as close as we were, I sometimes found myself despairing her long-lived genes. My great-grandmother lived to be ninety-six despite spending the bulk of her life without antibiotics or vaccines. My grandmother lived to be ninety-seven despite being shot in her seventies by a crazed stranger. I knew my kids would one day leave for lives of their own, but Mom’s needs would just keep growing. By the time my nest was truly empty, I thought, there would be precious little left of me.
When she died so suddenly, still issuing hilarious pronouncements and taking our teenagers’ side in generational disputes, I felt as if a madman had blown a hole through my own heart. Unmoored, I could not stop weeping. Caring for elders is like parenting toddlers—there’s a scan running in the background of every thought and every act, a scan that’s tuned to possible trouble. And there’s no way to shut it down when the worst trouble, irrecoverable trouble, comes.
A year later, before we’d even settled the question of where Mom’s keepsakes should go, my husband’s parents moved across several state lines to an assisted-living facility five minutes from our house. Physically frail—he from heart failure, she from Parkinson’s disease—they needed far more help than my mother ever did, but I figured their new living arrangements would surely make up the difference. After cooking for Mom, driving her to appointments, managing her medications, paying her bills, and washing her clothes, I looked forward to having parents nearby who needed only our love and our company.
Years earlier, when we told people Mom was moving to Nashville, men would look at my husband incredulously: “You let your mother-in-law move in next door?” After my in-laws arrived, my friends said much the same thing to me. But clichés have no place in this story: my husband loved my parents, and I loved his.
My mother-in-law was in every way a divergence from the stereotype: preternaturally patient, radiant with love, alert for ways to support and approve of her children, including those who had joined her family by marriage. Soon after our wedding, I heard my husband griping in the next room about how much money I spent on toiletries. “I just don’t see how anyone can drop thirty dollars in a drugstore without buying a single drug,” he said. And I was astonished to hear my deeply traditional mother-in-law take my side: “Son, Margaret works hard. If she wants to take her money and stamp it into the mud, you can’t say a thing about it.”
So when my in-laws moved to Nashville, only my sister’s objection struck home with me: “But you know how all this will end.”
In fact, my father-in-law collapsed three days after arriving and had to be hospitalized, and the stress of the move dramatically worsened my mother-in-law’s Parkinson’s symptoms. One crisis followed another: infections, head injuries, broken bones, even a fire. And each disaster meant the need for more help from us, plus a constant stream of houseguests as my husband’s far-flung siblings put their own lives on hold to pitch in. Back on the caregiving roller coaster, I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.
Even as he recovered from open-heart surgery himself, my father-in-law continued to coordinate my mother-in-law’s care. Once, overwhelmed by those responsibilities, he reminded my husband that in the old days families took their elders in. My husband reminded his father that in the old days people with heart failure and Parkinson’s disease didn’t live long enough to need the kind of help they already needed, never mind the inevitable disasters the future would bring.
My own mother could not afford assisted living, and we always understood that one day she would move in with us. But Mom wanted to be independent for as long as possible, and I had my own reasons for keeping at least a lawn between us: I work from a home office, and it would be nearly impossible to conduct my professional life with a needy elder in the very next room. The dilemma never had to be resolved with Mom, but it came up again once my mother-in-law entered hospice care. It broke my heart to imagine my beloved father-in-law living alone in that assisted-living facility after sixty years of happy marriage.
“But your dad would be lonely here too,” I said to my husband. “If he moves in with us, I’d have to rent an apartment. Wouldn’t it be better if he stayed in assisted living, where there are people around all day, and came over here for supper every night the way Mom did?”
My husband looked at me. “You mean an office, right?” he finally said. “If Dad moves in, you’d need to rent an office?”
I laughed. I meant an office, but for a moment he wasn’t absolutely sure. And in the end, my father-in-law stayed put.
Of course, my father-in-law had a point: families once worked in a very different way. During the Depression, when my mother’s childhood house burned to the ground, her whole family moved in with my great-grandparents. A few years later, my other great-grandmother moved in too. I was in college myself before the last of that generation passed away. “I’ve been taking care of people my whole life,” my grandmother wondered. “What will I do with myself now?” As my mother-in-law entered the last stage of a savage disease, when just getting through the days was a dreadful challenge for her and for all of us who loved her, I constantly reminded myself of my grandmother’s plaintive question.
Then we lost my beautiful mother-in-law too. I think of her, and of my parents, every single day. They are an absence made palpably present, as though their most vivid traits—my father’s unshakable optimism, my mother’s irreverent wit, my mother-in-law’s profound gentleness—had formed a thin membrane between me and the world: because they are gone, I see everything differently.