Road Trips

Art & Pat with Niece, Julia

My sister and I visited our 80-something-year-old parents this past weekend. We like to call these visits “sissy road trips.”  Barring my sister’s occasional motion sickness, these trips are fun. We make stops at Starbucks and laugh our way across the southern tier of New York State into Pennsylvania where my parents live. We bring an amazing dinner to share with mom and dad. It’s the same every time – chicken cutlets, homemade baked beans made by my husband, and potato casserole. My sister usually bakes a wonderful dessert. They eat this meal with gusto, and we join in at their small dining table in their cozy, little apartment.  Conversation flows. Occasionally, we must help my dad keep up with the conversation because his memory isn’t what it used to be.

It’s six hours one-way to get to my parents’ home. They live in a mostly rural area in a depressed little town.  I can’t even refer to it as a village like we do here in Vermont.  The drive and visit take approximately thirty-two hours total - it's a marathon.  My parents cannot accommodate us overnight, so we stay at a local bed and breakfast called Marigold Manor, a gorgeous Victorian a block away from my parents’ place.  

I wish we could see them more often, but somehow we manage not to do that. Twice a year seems to be the norm. Four other siblings who visit in between, spread out the cheer; and we all keep in touch by phone. I don’t consider visiting my parents a duty, nor is it a bore. I basically adore my mom and dad. But they chose to move away when they retired twenty years ago. And for all this time, they lived as they pleased. He groomed their acres of field on his riding mower. She tended a garden and fed the birds at their small home until they couldn’t maintain it any longer.

They’ve gotten through a few health crises. They experienced a weird accident when their car went off a rainy road and into a ditch. My mother prayed their way out of it and a passer-by called a tow truck. They were not hurt. I found out about the accident a couple of months later. Older parents can be secretive.  My parents always said they didn’t want to be a burden. I think they think they’re protecting us. In some ways, I guess that’s true, not that we asked to be let off the hook, and we all realize that the situation could change for them at any minute – that they’d have to move into a nursing home or perhaps back to New Jersey where my brothers and other sister live.

They don’t live under our noses so we aren’t saturated with the constant awareness of their decline. We can go off to work each day, hang out with friends, live our lives; and our parents become vague icons, people we visit and remember, but don’t interact with daily the way we did when we were children and young adults. We don’t know that the doctor ordered more tests. We don’t know when one of their friends dies.  We don’t know mom has painful arthritis.  It’s how my parents want it. I liken it to a forced separation. I wonder if they think that when the time comes and they are gone, we won’t feel the void so much. But my parents are wonderful people in many ways.  They would never be a burden, and about not feeling that void? I’m pretty sure they’re wrong about that.