Carrying on, A.D.

Nancy and Lester Bundy

                                                                                         


Fourteen years ago today, my father died of Alzheimer's Disease. He was an accomplished musician and I grew up in a swirl of classical music and jazz while playing underneath the baby grand piano with my sisters and brother. It was the soundtrack of my childhood.

It's now more than two years since my mother died of the same disease, a sad follow-up eleven years later.  Both were teachers and lovers of theater, music, art, and literature. All four of us apples did not fall far from the parental tree.

Now they're gone and it still surprises me. There is an enormous difference between the intellectual understanding that death is

inevitable and the reality of being an orphan. These two people live on dramatically in my memory and my own expression of life. My personal playlist still revolves around Chopin and Bach, Coltrane and Ellington, and every lyric of every Broadway recording I listened to on the old record player in the living room. Now I listen in my car to a CD of Dad playing Scott Joplin ragtime.

Lately, I've had several friends whose parents have passed into beyond. It is a truism that we are able to turn our own difficult experiences into a force for good with other people in need. That's happened repeatedly in the past couple of years. I am able to pass along what others gave to me and what I've gained from my own experience. 

It's also true that you don't know what it's like until it happens. I suppose that's true of most everything. Not everyone feels a profound loss at the death of a parent or parental figure. Most of my friends going through this are, as I am, veterans of caregiving. We're not kids anymore in need of regular meals or tuition money. Still, the loss of parents is the loss of generational knowledge and continuity.

At Grandma and Grandpa's house

I'm left with boxes of papers, photos, books, and recordings made or compiled by people who no longer exist. Because I had direct interactions with them, I carry sensory memories, intimate recollections that are still alive to me. Soon enough though, I'll be gone as well and fewer people will have any idea of who the people were who came before. We all, if we are remembered by anyone, become reduced to the few tangible mementos and artifacts that survive.

It doesn't seem like 14 years since my father died. My brother and I were at his bedside that day, holding his hands and talking to him. Mom was right here in the front room when her end came, surrounded by family, people who love her still. Alzheimer's had robbed them both of not just their vitality and expression, but any consciousness of self.  In each instance, at the very end of AD, only a shell remained.

Anyone who hangs around the planet long enough will lose someone to death. And it doesn't have to be a person; the death of a beloved animal companion can be devastating as well. As life continues after a death, it can feel incomplete, unnatural, as though the world has fundamentally altered. And while that acute sense of loss eventually diminishes, some of it seems to linger.

It's a new stage of life, I guess. I'm not sure where the memories live. And what do I do with the leftovers?