Generating Experience

On birth, death, and life in the middle

The sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

“The Circle of Life” (The Lion King, 1994)

Three months ago today, my octogenarian father had a stroke. It wasn’t immediately obvious what had happened. My sister and I had troubling phone conversations with him in which he expressed disorientation and weakness, but later in the day he seemed to recover. My sister, who lives nearby, came to see him a few hours later and decided he needed to go to the hospital. He subsequently went to a rehab center, where he substantially but not completely recovered. Yesterday, we moved him into an assisted living facility a few miles from where he has lived for the past 17 years (he’s spent his entire life in a 50-mile radius).

Dealing with one’s aging parents—figuring out my mother’s situation is next—is part of the life cycle. I’ve been acutely aware of this in recent months because my dad’s situation in the last year has coincided with the birth of my first grandchild, and the challenges faced in caring for the two of them are eerily parallel. In the weeks preceding his stroke, my dad engaged in a kind of prescient de-nesting that inverted the instincts of an expectant mother: he gave up his car, winnowed his paperwork, divested unneeded objects. The urgent question governing his life now is arranging appropriate daily care in a society that outsources and professionalizes the process in ways that would have seemed both alien and out of reach—actually, it’s quite financially precarious even as we do it—to previous generations.

That said, the underlying emotions one feels, like anxiety (is he going to be OK?), guilt (am I doing enough?), and uncertainty (what’s going to happen next?), are timeless. They are also comparable to the way one experiences them with one’s children as well as one’s parents.

I am happy that my father has met his great-granddaughter several times in recent months. It seems to have offered him moments of unvarnished pleasure. There’s something almost shocking about bringing an infant into facilities populated by old and sick people. A life force exerts itself even amid its ebbing.

All of this unfolds amid the quotidian realities of my own everyday life, a mix of predictable tasks like going to work, unpredictable ones like car trouble, and stolen moments of quietude. As someone with most of his days behind him among students who have most of theirs in front of them, I find myself with almost feral comfort in finishing a day without jarring incident. Life in the moment has its own ontological reality even as it’s saturated with past and future. Such a mysterious thing.