Summer is Over and So is My Former Role in the Family

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I was born the baby of the family

The youngest of three sisters, arriving as a “surprise” when my father was 47 and my mother just shy of 40, baby was my given role. To my chagrin, it was how I was always introduced to visitors.

“This is Jan, our baby,” my mother said, even when I’d reached an age when I towered over her.

When your two siblings are seven and twelve years ahead of you and your parents are older than everyone else’s in school, your relative youth is a core assumption, part of the bedrock of your identity.

It’s not all bad to think of oneself as forever young.It doesn’t occur to me that I could be too old to do what I want — take big trips, write books, float rivers, ride horses, wear wild shoes or, do nothing much at all if I don’t feel likeit.

Everyone is surprised to find they’ve grown old.

The day dawns when all the doctors, bankers, and city council members look like kids, and the little kids you’ve raised are approaching middle age, and it’s weird.

For a designated baby like me, it’s a continual shock. But I’m young, my subterranean identity protests, despite the evidence. I’m the baby.

It’s hard to let go of the illusion. The baby of the family is the one whose every achievement is regarded with amazement and amusement. Nobody expects much from a baby. Nobody takes a baby too seriously either, including the baby.

It’s so easy to believe that there is still plenty of time. That no choice is final. That when things get too hard or overwhelming, someone with all the answers will step in.

This summer that shattered the illusion for good

It’s not like I’ve lived my life as a female Peter Pan. I put myself through college and eventually sorted myself into a responsible adult.

I raised children and collected careers. My parents died — my father when I was 22, my mother thirty years later. I buried one husband and married another. I navigated, not always skillfully, the tricky transition from Mommy to mother of adult men. I retired and reinvented several times.

And still, part of me felt like I was a kid playing at being a grown-up.

Life has worn away that sense of myself so gradually that I’ve barely noticed. But this summer was a demarcation, ushering me past a one-way threshold.

Like all rites of passage, it involved rituals

In early June, my middle sister died. It wasn’t a surprise, or at least it shouldn’t have been. Her body and mind had been slowly and inexorably whittled away by a rare neurological disease until, after seven years, she was unable to move unaided, speak intelligibly, or do anything for herself.

Despite the excellent care she received and the frequent visits from friends and family, her life had dwindled to the point where I wished it was over for her and for those of us who had to watch her decline, which seemed it would never end.

Then suddenly it ended. I’d thought I would be relieved when it happened. Instead, I was weirdly frantic, throwing things in a suitcase, jumping on a plane that couldn’t possibly arrive in time as though there were anything I could do.

She had a large family and a much larger circle of friends. There would be a weeks-long pause between her death and her memorial to allow as many people as possible to attend.

And then her ex-husband of 40 years died the same week as she did. The man I’d known since I was a ‘tween, the uncle to my boys who hosted decades of family gatherings — until darkness overtook him and he betrayed my sister over and over and over again.

I’d been shocked and outraged. When he showed up a year after the divorce at another family wedding and happily announced his new girlfriend, I heartily hated him.

But that had been a long time ago. And while I may have wished him dead for a time, I wouldn’t wish what befell him on anyone. His death came after a years-long struggle with Lewy body dementia — a malady whose symptoms began to surface about the same time as my sister’s.

Those who ascribe to the idea of soul assignments may make of that what they will. But my three nephews, their sons, had now lost both parents within five days. Their father’s memorial would have to wait even longer.

My sister and her ex lived in a small town. Their bodies awaited cremation in the same mortuary.

Talk about a cooling-off period.

But first, my older son was married in the middle of June

At a beautiful shoreline destination in San Diego, I ricocheted from grieving baby sister to proud mother of the groom. My heart filled to bursting as I watched my son behold his movie-star-beautiful bride glide toward him on her father’s arm.

Joy ascended like champagne bubbles. Families merged into a new configuration. I gave a toast as I’d been asked, and felt both the privilege and the weight of moving out of one role in my son’s life and into another.

After a sumptuous brunch cruise on Coronado Bay with the wedding guests the morning after the nuptials, my husband and I drove back up the California coast to my sister’s memorial.

The service was beautiful and moving. The reception was exactly the kind of party she would have adored.

When we got back home, I was spent

There was my sister’s death and my nephews’ double losses to process. There was my son’s happy marriage to register. And there were the developments with my older sister and her husband, both deep into Alzheimer’s, who had to be moved into memory care the same month.

Besides the heat of July and August in southern Idaho, we were socked in by wildfire smoke. I moved slowly, as though the miasma had invaded my brain, staying indoors once the brief reprieve of the early morning hours passed.

It was hard to think. Hard to write. Hard to feel. Hard to know what to feel. I slept a lot, fitfully.

My ex-brother-in-law's memorial was in late August

I hadn’t planned to go, originally. It’s either a couple of plane flights or a fifteen-hour drive from where we live.

But as the date approached, I booked flights. In the face of death and grief, the only thing — and the crucial thing —you can do is to show up. I wanted to show up for my nephews, and since my sons couldn’t make it out from Colorado, I wanted to represent my branch of the extended family.

It wasn’t entirely unselfish. I wanted to see my central coast clan too, as well as the town that has been a second home to me for nearly 60 years. As the plane descended over rolling hills furred with golden grass and studded with oaks, amidst ranches and vineyards and fingers of mist stretching in from the coast, something within me clicked into place.

By that afternoon, I was surrounded by two younger generations, including a lively passel of cousins ranging from age ten to three. With the littles, I played silly games and took walks where we held hands to cross streets and cuddled up in pajamas on the couch before bedtime.

The next day was the memorial service — and I was surprised.

I was surprised by my tears, by the healing I felt, and by the power of, for lack of a better word, closure. Whatever dross of confusion and resentment toward my sister’s ex was burned away, and I was freed to regard his life as a whole — which was so, so much more than his errors.

“I’m lucky to have had him in my life,” I told one of the other attendees, and I meant it.

After a reception at a cousin’s home, we returned to the nephew’s house where I was staying. The little cousins bounced and wrassled on the sofa bed in front of a forgettable kids’ movie on TV. Their parents kept an eye on them while we hung out late into the evening.

I listened to the adults — the grownups who had been the sofa-bouncers back in my day —laugh and tell stories from their childhoods. And I answered their questions, recounting, at their request, tales from their pasts, their parents’ lives, and their grandparents’ stories.

I remember them as babies, toddlers, teenagers. Now grown and accomplished, they’ve surpassed me. To them, I’m quaint and hilarious, often unintentionally so.

But it’s all affectionate, and I know they respect me despite their good-natured teasing. I’m their wise woman now, their old lady, the only one left who remembers, however imperfectly, the family lore.

I returned home the next day, to a cool, gray afternoon offering the first breath of autumn. The summer is bookended, ready to come to a close, never to be repeated in the same way although it will return for as long as there are seasons.

I haven’t been the baby of the family for a long time. But after this summer I’ve relinquished the trailing edges of that identity for good. I have a different role to play now.

My intention is to inhabit it fully.