The Golden Years

As people age, the most striking and disturbing aspect of the process is, for some, the usually slow, but sometimes sudden, loss of independence. And a person simply cannot understand what that means until he or she experiences it.

In 1962, I started college as a married father of two, soon to be three. I had completed my military obligation and was working for the U. S. Postal Service. I attended college at night. My grandfather, born in Southwest Georgia just before the turn of the 20th Century, was slowly fading, approaching that long night we all face. His health would never improve, and he would die in his own bed during one of my infrequent visits with him.

During his decline, I contributed little to his comfort, ran no errands for him, took him nowhere. I did take some of my precious time to visit him during his last hospitalization at the Veteran's Administration Hospital. It was convenient, as the hospital was within walking distance of the University of Alabama Extension Center, which I attended. Later I went to the house which he built and I grew up in, and I shaved him, as he simply couldn't do it for himself. With no tone of anger or reproach, he asked me if I could visit him more often. I said yes, of course. But I didn't visit him more often. I spent more time with Chaucer and John Keats than I did with the man who had given me so much and had tried to teach me how to be a decent human being.

I look back on all that now with some added clarity, for my own world has grown smaller as my health has begun to decline. I'm in no way as sick as my grandfather was, but my degenerative spinal condition and my lung disease have definitely made me more dependent on others than I ever thought I'd be. It would be very difficult for me to live alone today, and my wife does things for me that I used to not even think about as I went about my daily life. At the time of my grandfather's death, I was healthy, robust even. I often worked 50+ hour weeks in a physically demanding job and attended college, too.

There is nothing I can do to change the way I acted in the past. I can only hope that my grandfather somehow knows how much I regret my selfish behavior. I still say to him how sorry I am.

As W. B. Yeats wrote, " 'All that's beautiful drifts away/Like the waters.' " Yes, it does.