And then there were two

A tight group of eight, disappearing one at a time

Growing up in my parent’s bad marriage, I was thrilled when they found Marriage Encounter. Along with that came a group of friends. Four couples, all working on their relationships with their spouses. For a brief time instead of a bad marriage, my parents had a work-in-progress. Then, came my father’s consciousness raising group that excluded my mother. It makes me think of when, as a tween we went to family therapy, but that split into individual therapy for each of us, doing nothing to heal the family problems. In the same way, doing the work on their work-in-progress fell by the wayside, but the friends stayed.

Al & Sybil, Carol & Jordie, and Ron & Rachelle.

Rachelle, Mom, Sybil

Those couples, and their kids, are the backdrop for a lot of memories. I can’t place the exact years; I was well into what I’ve come to call the “lost years.” Years and events that trauma, drugs and/or alcohol prevented from imprinting onto long term memory. But those family friends and families of friends became the aunts, uncles and cousins I didn’t really have. If it takes a village, they were part of our village.

Sybil, I loved because of how much she adored my mother. Rachelle, a generation younger than the others, was smart as a whip. Jordie was pure love. But people change, they die, they move away, they become widowed and find new partners. They forget. They fade.

Carol died. Then Jordie. When Sybil died, Al moved and lost touch with everyone. Al died this week, in memory care. His family reached out because the woman they remember as my mother would have wanted to know. They said that the next generation, my generation still thinks of her, remembers her this way or that. I’m not going to tell Mom about Al. Or that his family still remembers her. She wouldn’t know or understand who any of them are.

Parkinson’s, dementia and physical limitations inserted themselves in the close friendship between Rachelle and Mom. Some things are just hard to work past, especially when it takes so much energy to just try and stay here, in the moment. To remember who that person in front of you is, even if you’ve given birth to them. In a weird twist, it was our mother’s mutual declines that created a connection between myself and Ron and Rachelle’s daughter. We hadn’t connected when we were younger, because when you’re age differences matter a lot more in your youth than they do once you’ve passed middle age. The gap between and the ages of eight and a thirteen is light years. But between 48 and 53? Those five years are nothing. Especially when you share the same experiences, when you’re watching a parent fade away, because you can’t do this alone. I couldn’t. She couldn’t. No one can and no one has to, no one should even try.

Rachelle passed about a year ago, in hospice. I didn’t tell Mom.

I see a photo in my mind–I wonder if one ever actually existed–of the eight of the them. Fading away and disappearing from the picture one at a time. Those left, becoming more alone with each disappearance. When someone dies, you lose more than that person. You lose a frame of reference, confirmation of a time that used to exist, laughter, sadness, mundane things of which there is no longer any evidence. No proof that the thing, whatever it was, really happened. When someone dies, a part of me becomes inaccessible, or at least less accessible.

Mom and Ron.
They’re the last two. They both took college classes at the local community college once they were old enough to audit for free. I’m that old now.

Mom and Ron.
The last two. Who will go next? He is considerably younger, but she is also considerably older than any one in her own family ever was. Aunts, uncles, her mother - all went in their 60s. Her brother in his mid-70s. All died from cancer. She has had breast cancer twice, treated for skin cancer four times. We’ve stopped taking her for checkups because, why?

The photo in my mind, just the two of them, Ron and Mom, standing there, surrounded by the empty spaces that once held spouses and friends. I envy Ron his lucidity and cognition, his ability to still be here, still connect with his children, the world. I’m grateful for Mom’s dementia though, the fact that she wouldn’t be able to understand even if I did tell her, wouldn’t understand what I was saying at all. By the time I got to the end of the sentence her mind would be somewhere else. Living means losing things and people. Husbands, lovers, friends, aunts, parents. Dementia gives her the gift of invisible friends and lovers that joke with her, let her boss them around. People to make dinner plans with. I’m grateful she has that invisible (to me) world to interact with, she has those friends, the ones that will never leave her.

No one wants to be the last one standing.