The End Zone
Ross and I once went to a workshop with Jack Rosenberg and Beverly Morse where they talked quite frankly about being in the “end zone,” as distinct from being in middle age. According to Jack, once you cannot double your current age to arrive at an age you are likely to achieve, you’re in the end zone. From that day to this, I’ve thought a lot about the middle and end of life, and how people cross that line from middle age into the end zone.
At the time, we were in our 30s with five children living not-so-harmoniously together under one roof, and though we had a lot of burdens I did not consider us middle-aged yet. Now, in our mid-40s, middle age is definitely upon us, and much to my surprise it is great! Somehow my ability as a young woman to imagine myself in later years had included a romantic view of retirement, but not much detail on the nitty-gritty years of middle age. But at 43, no longer burdened with the angst and questioning of my 20s and 30s, with children moving into adulthood and out of my daily care, I feel vigorous, confident, and ready for a new, more independent phase of life.
Now it appears that at least for the time being that new phase o’ life includes caring for a father-in-law in the end zone, even as our youngest daughter Jojo has barely caught the kickoff in her own life, and Ross and I are hovering somewhere around the 50-yard line. Bill, Rosses father, is in his early 80s, and for the most part has remained fairly independent and capable of taking care of himself. But in the past couple weeks he has had either one or a few TIAs, or small strokes. The simplest things, like changing clothes, can confuse him, and often his replies sound more like koans or inscrutable prophecies than the result of logical thought processes.
Caring for someone in their final years is similar to caring for someone in their early years, except everything runs backwards. Their age of mental functioning goes downward, not upward. Rather than graduating from diapers to toilet training, people in the end zone do the reverse. And in my limited experience with dying people, it seems they go out rather like they came in: if they were hell on wheels as a 2-year-old, chances are they will be difficult to manage, stubborn and unreasonable, as they fade out of this life. Fortunately, Bill was a pretty easygoing child, so he is taking all of his new adventures in stride, letting us take care of him without too much resistance.
The resistance usually comes from within us, anyway. At least once a day I balk at some aspect of Bill’s caretaking, and only rarely can I match my friend Robert Sanoff’s prescription to “just do the next thing” without judgment. I am a person who always wants to know how long things are going to take. In the hardest days of raising my teenage nephew, I would tell myself little lies, like “only three more months” in order to keep going and hold the worst of the stress at bay. Having a pre-adolescent and an old man to look after is a lot easier than looking after four teenagers, but the same rule still holds: there’s no knowing when it will end. And while you can always say to a teenager, “I wish you would grow up!”, it’s a lot less socially acceptable to say to someone in the end zone, “I wish you would die!”
So while society at large struggles with issues of death, disability, and the end of life, I ponder them daily in a more personal, immediate fashion. What is good care? When do you take the person’s word for how they’re doing, and when do you substitute your own judgment? Is it a conflict to support someone’s life while they’re dying, while at the same time praying that their dying won’t be long and agonizing? Or is that just compassion?