2006.11.22: November 22, 2006: Headlines: Figures: COS - Cameroon: Journalism: Speaking Out: Parents: Greatest Generation: the Capital Times: Margaret Krome writes: Parents provide a lesson about how to grow old
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2006.11.22: November 22, 2006: Headlines: Figures: COS - Cameroon: Journalism: Speaking Out: Parents: Greatest Generation: the Capital Times: Margaret Krome writes: Parents provide a lesson about how to grow old
Margaret Krome writes: Parents provide a lesson about how to grow old
I'm thankful for my parents' robust spunk, support, love, laughter and determination to engage in their world despite the ravages of time. In August, as I packed thousands of their books, I discovered some of what strengthens and amuses them. As we worked through one five-shelf bookcase packed with books on language and writing and another five-shelf bookcase of poetry books, they found almost no books with which they were willing to part. I wondered how many they would ever read or even knew. Imagine my amazement when my father pulled out a book, turned directly to a page and read a poem to my mother, who knew it by heart. Then another book, well marked with slips of paper. I realized that these books were a critical part of their lives. In October I unpacked the same books in their new home, and my parents found more passages to read each other and me, bringing me firmly into a world they have shared for nearly 60 years. Journalist Margaret Krome served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon.
Margaret Krome writes: Parents provide a lesson about how to grow old
Margaret Krome: Parents provide a lesson about how to grow old
By Margaret Krome, Nov. 22, 2006
Next week I'll make my third weeklong visit to help my parents move out of the house into which they moved 48 years ago.
With their heart surgeries, back injuries and hurt knees, I'm grateful that their move came at a time when their health permitted it. Both parents are frail and both frustrated by their unaccustomed frailty.
Getting old can be so hard. My parents spent most of their lives not thinking about medical issues, even when they had reason to. My father's heart surgery years ago became forgotten as soon as his vitality helped us forget it. My mother's polymyalgia was a nuisance but not the axis of her life.
Today, doctor appointments are a weekly organizing challenge, long plastic pill organizers are essential, and both my mother and father are a stumble away from real problems.
The hardest part of getting old, says my father, is the irregular but relentless loss of friends and colleagues those who have made their world make sense for so long. When their close friend and the obstetrician who brought me into the world died last month, their whole community joined in prolonged mourning. Sadly, my parents have experienced this kind of protracted trauma enough to know how to steady themselves and move on with their lives, but it's terribly hard.
So I'm thankful for my parents' robust spunk, support, love, laughter and determination to engage in their world despite the ravages of time. In August, as I packed thousands of their books, I discovered some of what strengthens and amuses them. As we worked through one five-shelf bookcase packed with books on language and writing and another five-shelf bookcase of poetry books, they found almost no books with which they were willing to part. I wondered how many they would ever read or even knew.
Imagine my amazement when my father pulled out a book, turned directly to a page and read a poem to my mother, who knew it by heart. Then another book, well marked with slips of paper. I realized that these books were a critical part of their lives.
In October I unpacked the same books in their new home, and my parents found more passages to read each other and me, bringing me firmly into a world they have shared for nearly 60 years.
Moving out of their old house is a continuing exercise in diplomacy and restraint for all of us. The quantity of plastic containers that my mother accumulated would be, as she acknowledged herself last week, sufficient to pack a Girl Scout troop for a year. But they're still awfully hard to discard. Not to mention the records, sewing projects, furniture, doll cradles, cookbooks, pots and pans and other reminders of decades of family life.
My job is to help clear the house with a minimum of trauma and a maximum of savoring, but to clear it. For them, every item disposed of feels simultaneously like moving forward and yanking out the rug on which they've built their lives.
For all of the challenge, my parents are sometimes remarkably clear-eyed. I delight in being present as one discovers the disdain with which the other secretly holds a particular book or object. They're funny and political and socially aware. They are also still fully engaged parents of their four children. I marvel that, while I entangle names and confuse food preferences between only two children, they follow our affairs with understanding, interest, and noninterference. Their stories become richer, their memories more delightful to us all.
After I turned 50 in May, it took a while for its impact to register, but it did. I can't say that I relish the thought of the physical losses that accompany aging, but my parents, to whom I'm deeply thankful for their nurturing, wisdom, character and humor, have given me one more gift. I am learning from them how to age.
Margaret Krome of Madison writes a semimonthly column for The Capital Times. E-mail: mkrome@inxpress.net
Published: November 22, 2006
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Headlines: November, 2006; COS - Cameroon; Journalism; Speaking Out; The Greatest Generation; Wisconsin
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Story Source: the Capital Times
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Figures; COS - Cameroon; Journalism; Speaking Out; Parents; Greatest Generation
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