Parents' death

[pbrower2a]

(07-08-2021, 05:25 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: How does a generation change after most of its members lose parents?

Especially with millennials, they are described as "boomerang young adults" who move back to their parents after a relationship fails. What will they do when mom and dad are gone?

I can speak in my case as a Boomer, losing both parents about two years apart, one from Parkinsonism and one from degradation of his capillaries. Neither was exactly a sudden death, so I had some idea of what was coming. My mother kept her rationality to the end except for jealousy (goes with the territory. My father had disposed his car, and we basically traded off some care-taking roles such as ensuring that she had omeone helping with meals. I also got her to take more exercise than she really wanted to do... but I saw that necessary for maintaining some dignity. 

After my mother died I did everything possible to keep my father's morale up. I got him to go to church again (it meant something after his old association with his Masonic lodge went sour. I would have been delighted to get him involved with the Lodge again, if with a different lodge. I got him to take some trips, and encouraged him to get involved with a widow. Whatever it takes. But eventually he took a fall going into the garage for a soft drink (I would have been glad to get it for him, of course), and after that his mental state deteriorated severely. He became violent and abusive. He asked me to come watch Opening Day on cable TV. Darth -- I mean Justin -- Verlander was pitching for the Detroit Tigers, and of course brilliantly as usual. Instead of discussing the game he tried to get me to take him home even though he was still recuperating from the broken knee. I refused. He told me that he was a coward and a disgrace... and for a long time I could not watch a Detroit Tigers game, then a part of my life for about fifty-five years. One day I dutifully visited him and my cousin was there with his son... and he tore me apart in their presence. I was in tears, and I don't go into tears easily. By then I recognized that there wasn't much left there.

I did see him on the last day of his life... on a Saturday night. He was dying, and I knew it. He could no longer regulate his body heat, and I figured that I would get a call the next day telling me that he had died. (None of this prissy "passed away" stuff for me). That night I tried to get the aid of a clergy... any clergy. So I had to play the role, reading the 23rd and 33rd Psalms. (The first of course is one of the best known, and the 33rd I know from a German translation in a setting of a Bach motet). 

I have problems, being on the autistic spectrum, so I have to be nudged away from troublesome situations. Maybe my parents overprotected me... and whatever passed for elder wisdom was something that I had to supply on my own part. Now I am one of the old geezers, and I have little guidance. I still am on the spectrum.