When You Learn You Have to Take Care of Your Parents
I know exactly when that moment arrived for me.
My parents lived on Long Island, and my dad was working near the World Trade Center in Manhattan (decades before 9/11). I had embarked upon kid-raising in New Jersey and was teaching at NYU.
But my dad and I would meet once a week at a modest indoor tennis court in what is still known as the “Meatpacking District”—our foursome completed by my good friend Jim, who actually lived in Manhattan, and one of Jim’s friends.
My dad was really good at sports. I wasn’t (though, through sheer doggedness, much later in life I managed some short triathlons). But with my dad in his 60s and me in my 30s, tennis doubles sort of worked.
Then one day, as a ball headed his way, my dad crumpled to the ground. An ambulance came. St. Vincent’s, a city hospital, was nearby. He had, twisting to make a shot, broken his leg.
They did a decent job crafting a cast. But after that it was pretty horrible. Understaffed. Crowded. Some decades later the city would close St. Vincent’s.
Soon my dad had bed sores. And he was still some days away from walking.
My uncle Sid came by. I looked at him. He looked at me. And I realized it would be my job to get my father to a hospital on Long Island.
I would have to hire an ambulance, arrange for the new hospital, talk to his doctors.
My mother was a very capable woman, but this—the concerns, the logistics, just getting herself into the city to visit—had thrown her. It would be on me.
Which was scary. Which was sad. Which is life.
I handled it. One does. A coming-of-age moment sort of like your first romance, graduating from college, your first apartment, your first child.
I think of it now, of course, because I am approaching an age when my kids may have to handle this sort of thing for me.
Which is scary. Which is sad, but would be, yes, a coming-of-age moment for them.
Which is life. And which would be for me—as it must have been for my dad and mom—another kind of coming-of-age moment.