Cha – Cha – Cha – Changes

 I hope I don’t have to pay royalties to the David Bowie estate for that title!

Anyway - as much as I felt the whole world should have stopped right along with me when I embarked on my cancer journey – it didn’t.

Life went on and things moved forward.

A couple of the more momentous changes for us were the loss of The Wife’s father and my mother. Not unexpected in either case, but still, a loss to be felt.

Elmer, The Wife's dad (and not his real name), spent his last few years living with his middle daughter in Missouri and died under hospice care in his room at her house.

Elmer was a good source of amusing and outrageous stories, some of which have turned up in this blog. And while he was sometimes exasperating, his antics are missed. (Although, much to thier horror, certain traits of his are becoming evident in his daughters!)

He was an avid fisherman (Once his car rolled down the boat-ramp into the Missouri River [typical Elmer stunt] but when bystanders tried to save it he hollered “To hell with the car, it’s insured – save the boat!”) and often said that when he died it would only be fair to feed him back to the fish that he had eaten so many of.

Well it turns out the nosey parkers in various government offices didn’t like the idea of us chucking his body into the Missouri River at all! So we ended up dumping some of his ashes into the Gulf Coast off of Palacoius Tx where he spent so many winters fishing. A lot of his fishing buddies turned up on the chilly, blustery day to see him off.  In typical Elmer fashion, he thanked us all by wipping around in the wind and getting little bits of himself all over everybody.

My mom also died during those two years.

She was the daughter of Irish immigrants who worked as a taxi driver and upstairs maid in Belfast for around 10 years to pay for thier passage to Halifax, and then on to Detroit, around 1920-something before finally marrying and starting a family.

Lucky for us - her kids - Mom got our grandmothers gentleness and tolerance and not her father's unbending hardheadedness. Also lucky for us kids, though she grew up a city girl, she quickly took to dad's country outdoors lifestyle. (There's a family story that the first time I, the oldest of three, went camping was in a borrowed tent when I was two months old.)

Mom did inherit a touch of the old-world pessimism and for her, aging wasn't an adventure or even a part of the trip to be accomodated, it was an inevitable evil. Don't  get me wrong. She, a gregarious, outgoing, greatful, and generous person, fully enjoyed most of the 7 or so years she lived in a very nice senior comunity but she was wore out and frustrated by aging and more than once commented that she hoped she didn't live to be 90.

She didn't quite make 92.

The senior center she lived in was one of those where you pay a healthy up-front fee plus monthly rent, like buying into an exclusive club then paying regular dues. Once you're in (and you have to interview and pass muster first), they will never throw you out for financial reasons, and the facility offers any level of support you require.

Fortunately, for her and for my sisters who bore the brunt of her daily familial care, especially onerous towards the end, Mom went from independent living, to assisted living, to memory care, to hospice in the short space of about 5 months.

I was fit enough to travel in August of 2024 (road trip since I'm even more adverse to flying in a tube full of [shudder] people now than I was when I first retired) and was able to visit with her for several days, before returning in September to bury her.

With the loss of Mom, the last of our parents, my generation are now the atriarchs (be that M or P) of the family.

Something to ponder. (Holy Crap! I'm not near grown up enough to be an atriarch!)

When I was a boy and young man, the job of making the family reunion communal stew in a very large pot over a fire, something that takes all Saturday morning, was taken care of by our fathers. Eventually the job was passed on to my generation, who have since passed the tradition on to our kids, and the grandkids are standing by. 

Time moves on even if you don't.

There's been a few other changes around here over the past two years (I guess technically the blog title of "Travels of a Rambling Van" is a lie now) but this post is longer than it should be already, so that will have to wait.