Marriage Moats-Inheritance

Published: Thu, 04/11/13

Marriage Moats

Caring for Marriage

I was not expecting it. I don't recall anyone chatting about it at dinner parties or listing it with the predictable stages of life. But many of my age mates are taking care of their elderly parents. It is not always as involved as inter-generational living, though John and I did pull that off for six years. Sometimes it means daily check ins, or taking away the car keys after a fender bender. Other times when parents and their grown children live hundreds or thousands of miles apart it becomes more complicated to show up with a casserole. But people hop on airplanes at inopportune times because there is a broken hip or pneumonia.

When I scour my dappled memory for facts about whether my own parents faced this I come up short. I know my father sent a check every month to his widowed mother. Not that he could afford it on a minister's salary with four kids. But if he didn't cough it up, who would? Not one of his three divorced sisters. Not the brother who died too soon of emphysema. My mother's mother was self sufficient til the day she died. There was not even a body to deal with as she donated it to science. No coddling for Grandma Rose. She even took out her own trash.

My mother did need help in the end. It was hard to negotiate terms. I had been her baby for so long we both had trouble with a role reversal. But with awkward stops and starts I came to see that she could no longer stand in the shower, or fry eggs. This was embarrassing for both of us. When she did those things for me fifty years ago there was no shame. It was the script of mothering. But as her abilities atrophied, we both cringed. Childing was less well defined.

There is another aspect of declining parents that I was not prepared for. Inheritance. Sometimes when a middle aged couple is straining to make tuition payments for their last student, a tidy sum arrives to save the day. Because my mother lost most of her belongings in a flood there was no china or silver to divvy up. But there was a chunk of change to quarter and deposit. Not only that her estate paid for new black threads for all her grandchildren to wear to the memorial service. A shopping trip was her last hurrah.

Now that her body is gone I am not distracted by her wrinkles, or whether she finished her soup. I am left with something less visible. Her legacy. Some of the choices she made make more sense to me now. As I ease into the age bracket she was when I was a young wife, memories replay like You Tube videos. I may not have always been patient with her. I was after all swamped with my own brood. But remembrance of her and my father continues to impact me.

Even as I let them go they have the last word.

Photo by Joy Feerrar

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