Sandwich Generation at Seventy
By November, if all goes well, my wife and I will have gone from no grandchildren to five in under a minute. Well, not quite, but that’s what it feels like.
My parents have been married long enough to have children in their seventies, my mother the kind of 91 that everyone wants to be, my father, at 95, in decline.
I had no expectations about the process of maturing and aging. I never anticipated that we would become so deeply enmeshed in the lives of four generations that our days would be driven by the needs of those at the beginning and end of life.
We’ve just come back from visiting children and grandchildren on the West Coast. Museums and sandboxes. Painting watercolors and watching ballet. Making chalk drawings on the driveway. Back on the East Coast, we have one child about to give birth, and another due in November.
The daughter about to give birth is at term and needs to get to the midwife’s office for a weekly exam, but can’t drive herself there. Our son-in-law is at work, saving up as many days as possible for the paternity leave he knows is coming. She accepts my offer to drive her, and I am elated at the sound of my yet-to-be-born granddaughter’s heartbeat. The midwives and nurses smile, say how wonderful it is to have a father accompany his daughter to a prenatal visit. The wonderful is all mine.
* * *
A day later, I am in the car again — this time, with my mother. Never separated from my father for more than a day in their 72 years together, she has allowed herself to be convinced that she needs a break. I drive her to visit my sister and her family so that my mother can spend time with her daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandchildren –four generations on the beach at Cape Cod.
When I come back, it is to take care of my father on Sunday until his caregiver returns from church. For a brief moment, as he awakens from an afternoon nap, my father misplaces our connection.
“Which of us is older?” he asks.
“You were born 24 years before me,” I tell him.
His eyes widen in amazement, as they always have when he discovers something astounding. “We’ve been good friends for such a long time,” he says. “Isn’t it wonderful that two people of such different ages could become so close?”
I explain that he and Mom raised me. No one told him, he says.
He’s not wrong about friendship. He and my mother have been best friends for three-quarters of a century. He’s been a trusted friend and wise counselor for a long, long time to me and my siblings, our spouses and our children, our extended family. Now he is reduced to this, while the rest of us watch him disappear in wisps, like morning mist.
***
The next day I drive my daughter back to the midwife to see if there’s been any progress. Perhaps we will head off to the hospital where I will be of whatever little use any grandfather can be under such circumstances. Perhaps our baby girl will keep us waiting another few days. Or, perhaps tomorrow will be the day she appears.
* * *
Richness is more complex than simple joy. It is what you feel when you open yourself up to the extremes of what it means to be human. Elation and grief, life and loss. All at the same time. As well as I know anything, I know that it doesn’t get richer than this.
Except when it does. My granddaughter’s heartbeat fills the midwife’s examination room again. And then, like all children, she throws her parents’ elaborate plans up in the air and they come down higgledy-piggledy. I could almost hear her laughing in utero. With a sudden kick of her tiny foot she signals that she is ready to make her entrance.
The midwife, fearing her being born in my car, calls 911. I follow the ambulance, my warning lights flashing through red lights and frozen intersections. Always wanted to do that.
Less than four hours later, I cradle my granddaughter in my arms, stare at her delicate features.
Unbelievably, she returns my gaze. Her dark eyes ask, how’d you like my entrance?
“The first of many,” I whisper. “Welcome to the stage, little honey.”