(My father when young, the baby of his family, being watched over by the elders in his world.)
If we are living our lives well, we should occasionally shed certain identities we or others have created for ourselves. I am experiencing one such shedding. Up until March, I was the baby of my family. Approaching 50, my mother would still introduce me to the various caregivers and medical staff attending to her as her "baby". It bothered me to no end when I was younger. Somehow when one is approaching 50, though, and one's mother is living out her final days, the title takes on a particular sweetness... I didn't mind being called her "baby" last winter.
Through the process of writing these blog entries, I am slowly deciphering certain elements of my relationship with my mother, a relationship that has, perhaps, had a more profound impact on me than any other in my life. It seems, also, that only now, since her passing, am I free to explore what this relationship has been to me. I was the youngest, I was the "baby", but in one fell swoop as her soul took flight, so too did my sense of myself as the "baby".
For as long as I can remember, I was following others: my parents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles... I grew up surrounded by adults many of whom were old enough to be my grandparents. One such aunt passed away 3 days ago. Aunt Bea was 90, the last of my father's siblings. All in that family have moved on from this world. As I watch the leaves outside these windows turn from green to orange, red and gold, and then drop from the trees, I find parallels in my life. The elders in my life are all but gone now, and those in the generation that has followed seem more like my peers, although older by 15 or 20 years. This is probably because my siblings range in age from 9 to 19 years my senior. They do not seem a generation older than me: they are my siblings.
Because I grew up with elders, I have found myself to be most comfortable with people who are 30 or 40 years my senior. However, the pool of such individuals is shrinking daily, and within that pool, so many are losing their mental faculties. Each of us has our day and, like physical days on this planet, they disappear before we realize it.
It's difficult to shed an identity that has been with me for nearly five decades, but I am gradually coming to realize that, as I scan the horizon for those whose footsteps I might follow, I am, myself making footsteps, and there are some behind me, trying to follow in them. A snake sheds its skin, and a new, tender skin is revealed as the old one falls away. Like that snake, I have a new skin, but one that seems unfamiliar to me, one in which I am not yet at home. It's a skin that I have not yet learned to embrace. To be the one followed, rather than the follower, is a vastly different experience for me. With it comes an onerous sense of responsibility. I realize that from this point, for better or for worse, I am in the vanguard. The old guard has moved on.
It feels like a tall order.
I am comforted, however, in having witnessed my mother, as she lived out her final years, coming to grips with her own humanity and learning to more fully accept herself for who she had become, with all of her wonderful strengths and all of her foibles. She was at home in her skin, for the time that she had left to live in that skin - a skin that had become wrinkled and paper-thin, but it was her skin, and it afforded her a little more time on this earth to embrace and be embraced, and to give what she had yet to give.
The elders of my life have departed. The examples that they have given me of their lives, however, are as real and tangible as the sun-dappled autumn leaves outside my window. I can almost reach out and touch them. It is a wonderful mystery to me that their lives inform my life now more than ever before. I believe that I am beginning to understand why I felt so sure-footed when I followed in the footsteps of the older folks in my life. They too were drawing on the strength and wisdom of those who had gone before.
I begin to discern that there is an invisible chain of light linking me to these loved ones, who in turn are linked to those who informed and inspired their lives. I may have lost them to this physical world, but the image now coming into focus before me is of a golden chain connecting me to them and through them, to all previous generations.
When one stands between two mirrors, the reflections that result have no end. As I contemplate the links in the chain that connect me to my ancestors reaching back to the beginning that has no beginning, the effect is similar. Our connection to our ancestors is our connection to the infinite.
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