Cancer Journal #8 Dec 26

      In a prior blog entry, I suggested that there was a limit to the value of the lives of health care consumers in my age cohort. Old horses put out to pasture, I called us. In comments to the blog, someone gently reproved me for discounting the value of love that old horses can give. I realized that this is most certainly true. Grandparents can provide a foundation of loving support that some kids can just need for any semblance of emotional wholeness, especially when Mom has a disordered life that doesn’t include looking after the kids the way they should be looked after. 

     In my job, holding hearings on why people either got fired or quit their jobs, I heard snippets of life stories. The ones most piercingly painful were when grandmas died. It was taking away something that needed to be there. It was always grandma. If it happened with grandpa, I never heard about it. Not that it couldn’t. 

     My own mother was 90 when she died, 15 years after Ezekiel Emanuel hopes to die. She died too soon. She made herself part of the community of Vietnamese immigrants who lived in Iowa City Ia., helping them with English, navigating social service agencies with them, hearing out those who needed to be heard out. She just generally made a show that there was value in a lot of lives that weren’t getting much demonstration of that in the new world they were in. An essential thing for that community was gone when she died. 

     My mother-in-law provided an essential sweetness of love and acceptance to grandchildren and great-grandchildren who had lives that really needed that. A great-granddaughter told me at her funeral that she had skipped school to play Tri-Ominoes with Grandma. That was a life that would have had no business ending at 75.

     I feel a little foolish suggesting that the Ezekiel Emanuel Rule of 75 should be followed by all of us.  Jan Carroll made a comment that I was still processing my situation when I wrote that entry.  Jan has a kindness about her of a sort the world could use more of.

Comments

  1. StasiaDecember 26, 2020 at 6:09 PM

    She does.

    As do you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jan CDecember 28, 2020 at 11:07 AM

    Thanks, Charlie. Stasia is right, you are such a kind person! You have shown kindness to me SO many times.

    I loved hearing about your mother's and your mother-in-law's work in their later years.

    It seems the work we do in later years is sometimes not as showy as when we were younger, yet it has it's own quieter but much treasured value.

    ReplyDelete

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