BOOKENDS

Since I have lost both my parents, I hope I have been able to help friends and loved ones through the unique emotional void that the absence of a parent will bring.

Because the unequivocal fact is that our parents are the bookends of our lives. When they falter, they allow the beginning of a tipping and tumbling that will only worsen when they fall. And when they are gone, despite our knowledge that they are "together again," they are not here. Not here to hold us up, to hold us together, to hold us apart, to hold us.

My friend Michael just lost the second of his parents in a deeply spiritual, seemingly-miraculous sequence of events (I attach his post. Please stop and read it now, then come back and we can finish). http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs196/1102973769100/archive/1115645804239.html

When Michael lost his mother, he and the rest of his well-grounded and well-connected family were well-prepared.  I also attach that post, and believe me, the story is worth the detour. See you in a few minutes.
http://samiwolf.blogspot.com/2012/10/our-goings-out-and-our-comings-in.html?m=1

Not long after his mother's death, Michael lost his younger brother who had been somewhat less-connected - yet his passing resulting in a re-connection in faith and discovery for the surviving family members. And when, this past week, Michael's father passed away, the family faced death anew, jarred by the loss of 3 family members in just over 12 months.

Parents are gifts given to us by God to be the bookends of our lives.  Better visualized by those of us old enough to remember real books on real shelves, bookends are a metaphor I direct at us because we are the generation losing ours.

When I spoke to Michael after his father's visit (and before his death), I heard in his voice a disconcerting anguish at having seen his father injured, hospitalized, in need of care. He harkened back to his mother's bedside... parents are not supposed to be prone, but upright.  I recounted to Michael a vignette of one Easter when my mother, ever the holiday grand dame, had been forced by illness to experience the mealtime festivities passively from the family room couch. It was eerie and unnatural, and etched in my memory. I recall now stories from my dear friends Linda and Johnnie of the family vigil they kept for Linda’s mother Lily, and the role reversal of catering to the loving matriarch on whom 2 generations had been so emotionally and often physically dependent.  Additionally, Linda’s experience with her brother Roy, whom she nursed in the last 2 years of his life, came to mind.  Roy had been a magical proxy parent for his great nieces, Linda’s grandchildren, and seeing him hospitalized for surgery and infirm during rehabilitation flooded the family with memories of his bigger than life benevolence to them. 

It is natural for us to be perplexed at this unsettling experience of looking down to care for these bookends of our lives. English romantic poet William Wordsworth may have penned "Child is father of the man" over 200 years ago, but none of us is ready for that dizzying turnabout.

If you have lost one parent, you can already feel the shift. You and your siblings will band together like a patchwork of gap-filling, but the steadying influence often eludes you.  A bookend is gone.  When you lose (or have lost) the second parent, you find yourself shaken by the ultimate life pivot: Now, at a time when you face your mortality in the knowledge that you are without bookends of your own, you realize you are the bookend for your generation of siblings, for the next generation of your children, and perhaps for the next generation of your family’s future.  Each requires the anchoring support you provide. 

The dilemma can be overwhelming unless you stop and listen to your own heartbeat.  It beats in the rhythm, passed to you through grace, of the ones whose bookend support came before you.  In their passing, your heart will beat with all the lessons, all the values, all the memories, they have left you. 

Take heart.  Just be still and listen.