c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Marc Howard Wilson is a rabbi, columnist and organizational design consultant in Greenville, S.C. Collections of his essays can be found at http://www.marcmusing.com and http://www.eGullet.com. He can be reached at marcwilson1216(at)aol.com.)

(UNDATED) In the aftermath of an elderly man killing folks as he plowed his car into a crowded market, a representative of the American Association of Retired People is asked how one deals with the painful issue of not allowing father or mother to drive anymore.

The AARP rep acknowledges the trauma and dryly suggests this might be accomplished by asking “someone more detached and objective, like a therapist, doctor or family clergyman” to break the news.

People who have not yet faced that daunting prospect might actually think it a good idea, if not an easy out. Children of aging parents, like my kids, who know the eventuality they are facing, might still think it is a decent alternative, but may feel a creeping edge of skepticism, as the advice grates against a higher filial instinct.

And then there are the people who have already been obliged to take away the keys, face the trauma, recognize its necessity, yet still struggle with the guilt.

I am one such person.

My dad’s descent into senile dementia came in jagged steps, not a smooth slope. Tragically ironic, but one could chronicle those jagged steps by the evidence he left in their wake: He would work daily on his stamp collection, until one day he simply stopped, catalogs lying open, tweezers, stamps, hinges, all left in place from the day before. Likewise, his photography, his crosswords, his newspapers and magazines, his inability to answer the phone, pay the bills or even click the TV remote.

All this, of course, came in tandem with taking away his car keys. The car went to my son, but each day my dad would ask, “Where is the car? We have to go shopping!” I would repeat as compassionately as I could, “Joey has it. I’ll do the shopping.” Each exchange stabbed me between the ribs, wrenched the knife and forced a little more life out of my collapsing lungs.

All of us who have been there grieve and torture ourselves 10,000 times, not over the rationality of protecting our parent and the public, but over the irrational feeling we are doing some evil by denigrating a parent’s independence and ability to make responsible decisions.

The torment we feel is about being the reluctant conduit to a journey from which there is no return. The pain is about losing any last pretensions of our own fleeting youth. The trauma is about a little part of us dying, and dying again, and again, with each bit of mortality that we acknowledge in our mom or dad. The heartache is about the futility of yearning for the momma and poppa who enveloped us in their all-protective arms when they and we were young. The grief is about being orphaned while our parents are still clinging to life.

Yet I believe that any one of us who has faced the trauma would tell you that he or she would not have done it any other way.

We would not tell you that we were martyrs. But we would tell you that we did not abrogate our responsibility to our parents’ safety and well-being _ that we did for a moment sublimate our own grief to face the pain it sometimes takes to care for those who have given us life. We would tell you that, for all the self-recrimination, the thought of some indifferent surrogate letting us off the hook would have been even more grievous.

We would tell you that deluding oneself into believing that he or she has “gotten off the hook” is likely to eventually bring even greater torment than facing the responsibility to one’s parents personally and forthrightly.

My guess is that, despite the AARP representative’s assertion, any honorable therapist, doctor or cleric would tell you the same, not be co-opted into absolving a child of a painful mission he or she alone must accomplish. Finally, we would tell you that the pain we withstood, and that torments us even now, was still the highest articulation of our love.

I pray that my own children will remember the responsibility I awkwardly took, and the grief I suffered, in acknowledging that my dad’s vitality had dimmed and it would return no more. So may it be with your kids. Perhaps they will realize that the fullness of life is messy and not without its price, and it cannot be sanitized by a gloved surrogate-for-rent and hermetically sealed in a zip-lock bag.

Let them at least know while we are still of sound mind that they have our blessing to take away our keys, literally and figuratively, when we can no longer safely drive our own lives. Let them at least know the love we show them now might eventually counterbalance the trepidation and guilt that might confront them later. Let them at least know we love them and know they love us. Somehow, I believe that if we give them the message, they will get the message.

DEA/PH END WILSON