Countdowns

I think it’s one of every parent’s most dreaded moments—the first time their children start to push them away. From the moment their baby breathes its first breath, they know that day is coming; they just don’t know when.

I have few concrete memories from my childhood days, but I can imagine, and still have the faint trace feelings of when I first did this to my mom.

Maybe it was after she dropped me off at school, and when she tried to give me a hug, I squeamishly accepted it as fast as possible so no one would notice.

Maybe it was when I persuaded my parents not to come chaperone a youth group trip because I was going to a predominantly white, evangelical church, and my parents were neither known, and definitely not cool.

Or maybe it was when I walked down the aisle during my high school graduation, and my parents happened to sit on that exact aisle. I remember the surprise of when we made eye contact. My mom, she leapt to her feet and extended her arms, a camera in hand.

“Daniel!” she shouted. “Come take a picture.”

“Mom!” I grumbled under my breath. I hated that she’d noticed me. I hated that in my symbolic moment of becoming an adult, I would be reminded that I was still someone’s kid. I hated that I might hold up our line if I took a photo with her which would obviously be rude to everyone behind me, right? 

And so I ordered her to sit down.

And she did. With a look of disappointment I will never, never forget. This memory, this one is both concrete, and real.

Fifteen years later, I suppose the tables have turned.

I have routines that I go through to take care of my parents, a limited number, but a few nonetheless.

On Sundays, I drive my parents to church. I make a pit stop at a nearby Starbucks (where I’ve made friends with a barista), and then an hour later, go back to pick up my dad and take him home.

On Mondays or Tuesdays, preferably around 11:30am (because it’s less busy), I take them to the same dim sum restaurant in the next town over. I pick the day and time because it’s less busy, leaving fewer opportunities for my no longer cognitively-there dad to cause a scene.

The staff there have come to learn to be a part of our routine. They know what we need: a window table, a mix of chrysanthemum and pu’er tea, still water for my mom, and the same five or six dishes we always order. Give us these things, before my dad notices and complains, and we’ll be good to go.

On most other days, and often every day in fact, my mom goes for a walk outside. She has a normal route she takes around the neighborhood park, and I used to go with her.

Used to.

It should be no surprise that for a while, I read a lot about death, and dying, and how there are a certain number of times we’ll get to do more of any particular activity. The reality is, we’ll never know. We’ll never know how many more times we get to do anything, and personally, I’m not trying to keep count. That’s part of the mystery, and maybe therefore, the beauty of it.

But the danger in not knowing how many times there are left, is that we no longer treat life as if it’s limited, as if there’s a countdown ticking. You think you can do everything forever. And for some reason, that diminishes each and every experience.

So I wonder, as I consider my own future—one day I’ll move out, and one day beyond that, my parents’ condition may worsen again and I’ll have to come back, again—and yet there is still a limited number of times I’ll get to do any of this.

“I’m going to go for a walk now,” my mom says to me one day.

“I’ll come with you,” I respond, and not as a question.

“No…” she starts, as she usually does. “You have things to do.” This is always her excuse, though she doesn’t really know what I ‘have to do’ anyway.

I could argue using evidence, that I don’t have anything to do. But evidence is one of the weakest weapons in a caregiver’s arsenal. So I try a different tactic. “What if I want to come with you?” I say.

At this point she usually relents, either because the truth is she actually likes having me with her, or because she doesn’t want to fight me.

But this time, she does something entirely different.

“No,” she says, “I don’t want you to come with me.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Why?”

“I walk very slow. It makes me nervous and you go so fast.”

I can sort of understand this. Sometimes, when she goes for a walk, I’ve used it as a chance to go run a few laps ahead of her so that we can do a similar activity, together. I try to focus on this, being together.

“What if I just want to spend time with you?”

“I would rather you not come,” she says, almost, commands.

And there’s something in the way she says it, the way her eyes almost look like they’re pleading with me, that I surrender to her desire.

Truth be told, I never loved the walks; they weren’t fun, per se, and all things considered I would’ve rather had done something else. But I learned to find meaning in the small things, the details. How my mom starts saying ‘hi’ under her breath when another stranger approaches us, as if she’s preparing herself for conversation. How every so often there’s a group of dads (or I assume they’re dads, this is the suburbs) that play soccer together on the fields. How the hills of Mount Diablo turn green after the rain and it smells like the freshest of air and the sky above just looks so unbelievably blue.

I think I noticed those details because I knew this day would come, the day when I would no longer be able to experience going on a walk with her. I wondered when it would, though I thought it would be because she wouldn’t be able to walk and I’d have to push her around in a wheelchair. Or maybe because she would’ve passed onto whatever life has in store next after this current one.

But I didn’t think it’d come so soon, and definitely not because she simply didn’t want me walking by her side.

And so that has become our new routine. She tells me she’s going on a walk. I ask to tag along. She denies it. And I let her deny it.

I also can't deny that some part of me doesn’t wince with some amount of emotional pain when she shoots my request down. But I choose to accept it, and laugh at it.

It’s only fair. When I was a kid, her kid, I did that to her too.