Monthly Archives: November 2016

By Gregory Keer

If you ask my wife, I am forever trying to catch up with her. When we walk the dog together, she’s booking down the road like a New Yorker trying to catch a cab while I mosey behind like a movie cowboy after a giant breakfast. Speaking of eating, my children constantly complain of how deliberate I consume dinner. I eat the way a worm might chew on a peanut butter sandwich.

Yet, when it came to starting a family, I was not alone in my slowness. While I was taking a circuitous career path through various writing and teaching gigs, my wife was also wending her way through graduate school. Neither of us was ready to have kids in such uncertainty, particularly because we were making only enough money to get by.

By the time our first child entered the world, Wendy and I were into our 30s, a decade older than our parents were when they began having kids. But we had jobs, just enough money to buy a small house, and a surrounding family populated by our son’s grandparents, several great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and plenty of friends. We had love and support and a constantly growing wave of positivity that built as Wendy and I developed meaningful careers while we grew our family with only rare cloudy days to darken a bounty of sunshine. Life ambled at a pace that felt just right.

As I hit the late-40s of my charmed existence, the speed of existence revved up. My father came down with a virulent strain of cancer and was gone within five months. It happened so fast, I’m not sure I had enough time to draw a full breath. Now, I feel as if it was merely yesterday that he was with us. I still imagine life with him around to applaud his grandchildren’s accomplishments and just to talk about baseball on a Sunday.

Within a year of my father’s passing, my father-in-law’s health began to deteriorate due to Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Sheldon was always a rock of a guy, a man of few words, but enduring support of his family. Worse for me has been watching my wife struggle to help him, her mom, and her sisters cope with the kind of extra care he needs to merely live out his days in ever-dimming light.

I write all of this to gain perspective on being in what is commonly called a “sandwich,” of being some kind of mystery meat between the slice of life that is raising children and the slice that is caring for aging parents. Sure, I saw a number of our friends scrambling to pick up kids from carpool and aid them with their college applications while helping parents stricken by everything from illness to financial woes. But that wasn’t supposed to happen in my family. We were meant to get our children through university, first jobs, and maybe even marriage before our parents started to fade. We had plans for our parents to coach us through a few more trials with the kids and regaling us with the wisdom of experience so that we could just enjoy the highlights of success.

Instead, we are dealing with pediatricians and geriatricians, nurturing our children’s wills while reading our parents’ wills, cheering at soccer games and hoping our remaining parents will still be able to recall our names.

Clearly, living in the sandwich is no picnic, but — it is vital to turn the sandwich into a feast of thanksgiving. We really have so much to be grateful for in that we have had parents in our lives who have loved us, taught us, and guided us so that we can bring up our own kids. We must be thankful that these parents have cherished and rejoiced in their grandchildren, and that these grandchildren have been lucky enough to be spoiled and schooled by their grandparents for every year they have had with them.

We must also appreciate that we still have a gaggle of grandmothers, and one great-grandmother, who are full of life despite the losses they have undergone or are undergoing. These women constantly remind us that the road provides plenty of detours yet strength and a focus on love keeps us all on a path of good surprises.

This Thanksgiving will be nothing like I would have imagined. It will not have all the people we would have wanted to be there and the conversation might be more about medical procedures than report cards. However, it will be a table around which sit vibrant living people and wondrous spirits who help us slow down to savor the time we have with each other.

© 2016 Gregory Keer. All rights reserved.