Morris - Bobby Wonderful

Just before Christmas a few years ago, I met a man at a holiday party who was ecstatic after seeing a major ballet companys performance of The Nutcracker. His mothers ashes, he told me and a few others gathered around him, had been used as the snow on the setsprinkled in with the usual fake stuff covering the floorand the remainder had been dumped into a box with the rosin that dancers use on their toe shoes. None of them, of course, knew about it.

She loved ballet so much, he said. It was the perfect ending.

One mans perfect ending is anothers gruesome one, I guess. My family has never been the cremating kind. But as the exuberant man went on to explain how the strange occurrence had come to bethe artistic director of the ballet company had known his eccentric mother, who was a fanand how happy he was that he had been able to show her out with such panache, I started thinking about the conventional burials of both my relatively conventional parents. Then I thought about my own engagement with them in the last years before they died.

When this mans mother became infirm, he told me, he moved her into his small house in a tiny Virginia town without a second thought. He rallied the entire block not just to befriend her but to show up to amuse her and help him help her as she languished. This busy man, a media specialist with a passion for the advocacy work that sends him around the world, didnt think twice when the time came to take his mother in and make her a major part of his hectic life.

I loved her and I wanted to do the best I could for her, thats all, he said.

His cheeks were red from the beer he was drinking and the warmth of the party. He wasnt mourning at all, it seemed. Rather, he was joyful and triumphant, and also, of course, relieved to be done with the wrenching and prolonged process of helping a loved one die.

It was hard, but I learned so much from doing it, he said.

He even made a reluctant adolescent niece go in and look at his mother in her last days.

I told her getting old isnt pretty but its important to see, he said.

He talked and talked, and I listened without saying a word. With my own parents and their last years, there were so many moments of aggravation, anxiety, and despair, but rarely the triumphs that this lively man was able to find with his mother at the end of her life. When people speak about a good death, it can mean many things. It seemed he had provided her with an excellent one, right down to what could only be described as a showstopping finale.

And what had I done for my mother? I wasnt helpful as an advocate with her doctorsI left that to my assertive older brother. And I wasnt all that present (at least in my mind) at the end of her life, or at the end of my fathers life either, even though they were nearby. My father even had to shame me into visiting him more often and for longer amounts of time, which I found both infuriating and mortifying. Much as I loved him, the old man could get to me right to the end. He could not bear any criticism, but he was full of advice, regardless of his lack of expertise in any given area. If I had moved in with him as hed once suggested, we would have both ended up dead. He was, after all, a mess-making and willful character who didnt follow the simplest instructions and would talk the ear off anyone inclined to listen. My mother was easier and more contained, but she had her issues too, including such a fear of any kind of risk taking that she would cancel plans at the slightest chance of inclement weather. She was doting, but not at all amusing like the exuberant mother who ended up in The Nutcracker. Shameful as it is to admit, neither of my parents was what Id have ordered from a parent catalogue. And yet they were so good to me; they loved me so much, even more than each other.

They deserved so much more than what I gave them in their last years.

Why does it bug me so much that I didnt do enough for them? Is that something most sons and daughters tend to feel around parents? I still feel it today, with mine both long gone.

Saying good-bye to the parents. Facing their last years, if not with valor, then at least with humor and equanimity. Its a topic that seems to come up all the time now, as much a matter of demographics as a strange new urgency of the boomer generation to process everything in public. Our parents are living longer due to advances in gerontology, and it throws us up against questions about how to help them out without totally sacrificing the quality of our own lives.