Births, Deaths and Remembrances 1

My father passed away on Monday, March 9 at 2:15 AM while in Hospice care.  He was 93 years old.  Two days later, on Wednesday, my niece Renee gave birth to Maia Gabrielle, a healthy 7 lbs 2 oz baby girl, born two years to the day after Renee's grandmother, Randi's mother, died, also at the age of 93.

Dad was cremated on Friday.  My brother, Mark, and his wife will be driving up to Monterey from San Diego to pick-up his ashes and his few remaining belongings.  Mark and I will be carrying my father and mother's ashes (she died in the spring of 1997) to Hollywood, Florida this summer, where we grew up, and have many fond memories.  It is a ritual of closure for the living.  We will sprinkle their ashes on the beach, at the foot of a lifeguard stand, symbolic of our time in Florida, and a tribute to the influence of a certain lifeguard, fondly known as Big John.   

Mark and I are all that remain of our little family, neither one of us having had children of our own.  Neither do we have a family home to attend to, my parents choosing to reside in assisted living in their retirement, before moving to nursing care.   After several serious strokes, I chose to bring my father to our home in Carmel Valley, California when his physician advised that he had no more than weeks to live.  He lived another four years.

It is an inevitable circumstance of those fortunate enough to be long-lived to witness the passing of our parents.  We fall apart a little, or a lot, and are put back together again, to move forward through our own lives.  

My brother and I, and our respective spouses, did good work in supporting my father after mom's death.  We committed ourselves to seeing that he remain as independent as possible, for as long as possible.  However, dementia was at work impairing his judgement long before we attributed his erratic behavior to anything more than Dad's stubborn willfulness.  It just wasn't on our radar.

Now I wonder about the nature of habit, and the trajectory our lives take.  Were my dad to know his fate, what might he have done differently, if anything?  I expect that he would have dismissed it as so much nonsense.  

The lessons here are for the living.