REVEAL

I pushed my father in a wheelchair for the first time last month. As I fast approach sixty years of age, I am solidly situated in the sandwich generation with three young adult daughters and four parents who are struggling to age gracefully. So many of us are working hard to be present to our children while also clumsily adapting into caretakers for our parents who are entering into the late autumn of their lives.

There is a unique kind of grief that we carry as we accompany an aging parent, to which the science behind the beautiful autumn leaves all around us this time of year offer an unexpectedly consoling metaphor. All those brilliant reds, golds, and ambers we admire in October are actually the leaves’ true colors. The green of spring and summer is actually the mask. Chlorophyll is so dominant, so overpowering, that it hides every other hue beneath it. Only when the growing season ends and the chlorophyll fades do the leaves finally reveal what they were all along: their most authentic colors.

This insight shifts the way I view the gentleness and eagerness to listen in my Dad’s “old man eyes,” and the way my Mom—who could juggle and perfectly arrange the complex logistics of meals, transportation, calendaring, costumes, vacations, and family gatherings as efficiently as the most gifted air traffic controller—asks me to help her up from our low couch with an awkward giggle and revels in teaching my daughter how to make her famous Italian cookies as her stiff hands tremble with the weight of eight decades. There is rich beauty in the vulnerability that aging brings, an awareness and openness to receiving love that our youthful competence never quite allows.

Just as we can’t shield or save our children from all the turbulence and fumbles that are so necessary for their growth in their teens and twenties, so too we can’t navigate all the uncertainties and complexities our parents face as they move into the challenging landscape of old age. The hardest moments come in the small losses: the stories that now have gaps, the grandchildren’s names that slip away. Each forgotten detail is a tiny death, a small goodbye to the people they were. Just as the last time I chanted “this little piggy” on my daughter’s toes in the tub or held her on my hip as I did the “momma-sway” passed without fanfare, so too there will be a last Christmas hosted by Mom…a last wrench held by Dad. Little endings that pass without our awareness.

In her work Praying Our Goodbyes, Joyce Rupp uses the butterfly’s metamorphosis as a metaphor for the spiritual transformation of aging: the caterpillar represents our youthful false self, the chrysalis symbolizes the dark periods of struggle and loss where transformation occurs, and the butterfly embodies our liberated, authentic self that emerges from this process. Just as a butterfly must fight to break free from its chrysalis to develop strong wings capable of flight, we must fully experience our pain and grief to achieve genuine spiritual growth. Attempting to spare our loved ones from suffering, though compassionate in intent, actually robs them of the transformative power of the experience that will eventually enable them to fly.

Accompanying our children and our parents through all the mighty upheavals of aging is sacred work. Loving accompaniment is often all we can offer, and in this accompaniment, we too experience transformative pain and loss. A little of our green fades and our own true colors begin their reveal. It is such a beautiful mystery how love protects us from nothing, even as it sustains us in all things.