Friday Flames: (on Wednesday): Happy Thangstgiving
After several months of coping with the macro-chaos, Thanksgiving gave us a welcome respite to let us focus on the micro-chaos of our families instead.
Is it revisionist history to look back on long-ago Thanksgivings as relatively care-free? Apart from the evergreen travel headaches, we all seemed happy enough just to be together around a colossal meal and, from time to time, set extra chairs for friends who’d otherwise be on their own.
But it all gets harder with age, and if yours is one of those families where everyone at the table says what they’re most grateful for, a lot of that gratitude goes hard. You’ve realized you can’t take much for granted anymore, and the thank-yous come from a very deep place. (Special shout-out to Doug’s brother, who drove two hours to Phoenix, red-eyed to Boston, took a bus to New Hampshire, and drove the grandparents to New Jersey and back. The meritorious service ribbon is on its way.)
Doug doesn’t see his family as often has he’d like, so it was hard not to focus on the ravages of time since they all ate together two summers ago. There was a lot more gray and wrinkles, and the youngest person, his 16-year-old nephew, looks like he’ll be 6’9” before he’s done. To have everyone together, still alive and ambulatory and (mostly) alert, seemed a miraculous blessing before the inevitable big changes that could arrive any minute now.
In Magda’s case, those big changes are here. In her experience with elder care and health crises, it's always something—and that something often hits right around Thanksgiving. This year, her father is in skilled nursing care while the family tries to figure out why his muscles can’t support him and whether his kidneys still work.
Her parents don’t want him to molder in a long-term care facility, and she and her brother have spent countless hours talking with various health professionals, faxing POAs, waiting on hold, and just being generally pissed off while they try to figure out what their options are.
The only bright spot is that Magda and her brother have done this before, when they honored their uncle’s wishes to be pulled off life support. Doing that and then planning the funeral together builds a lot of trust. So this feels a lot like getting the band back together to play the world's most morbid gig: how to give your father the best possible last few years and a really good death.
This is one of those experiences that is both isolating and yet totally not. When you're in the weeds, you know you’re the only one who can ultimately power through them. But when you accept all the help you can, even if it’s just words of comfort and encouragement, it gets so much easier to pull your pants on and adult like you’ve never adulted before.
The conversations we have on this podcast offer up more comfort and encouragement than we could have possibly predicted. And we’re both extra thankful for that.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back with Episode 64 next week.
Magda and Doug