Across 30 months, and through 445 chapters in this memoir, I have been laboring to express the nature of my experience living with dying parents, how they have loved and irritated and blessed and taxed me, and how I have worked to keep them in their home and to care for them as they wane.  Sarah’s death was the most suddenly catastrophic and painful event of my 60-year life.  She looks at me kindly from her pastel blue-gray frame sitting on my desk, from behind the glass, always soft, always beautiful, always kind, to me.  Her traumatic passing has caused me to reevaluate my approach to love and family relationships, not in the shallow patronizing Western platitudes like “It must have been her time,” as if there were anything divinely ordained in her snow-blindness and bashing her helmeted head against a tree, or “You will grow from this, and become a better person,” implying I wasn’t a good enough person already, and somehow her death was for me.  Sorry—I don’t buy it.  What I do buy into is the pain and the sorrow and the memories and the dogged desire to be everything she believed I was and could be.  Something about sudden bone-crushing flat-smashing breath-sucking loss has a way of revealing stupidity and error, pointing me to a truer reflection of my life and myself.  And the notion occurred to me that I have travelled across 30 months and through 445 chapters in this memoir with perspectives that beg for reexamination.  And the thought distilled upon me that my purpose here is not to care for my parents until they die, a shuddering inevitability filled with extended anticipatory griefs, but instead to care for my parents so they can live, live everyday with comfort and companionship and compassion, even joy.  So, I am reframing the narrative.  Sarah’s family came over for Sunday dinner today, our first without her, and we sat around our pot roast and potatoes and told stories and related challenges and laughed and loved, and forgave, and it was a happy day for Mom and Dad to be with their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, all beloved and beloving.  We will do it again, and again, and again, not dreading a death but celebrating a life, and it will be hard and wonderful.

(Pictured above: my snow-filled trail in Bell Canyon, Sandy, Utah, where I pondered the concept of reframing.)