“Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.”

– Soren Kierkegaard

I’ve just returned from spending five days with my parents and my three siblings.  It is always bittersweet to make the trip to Florida and see everyone face to face instead of just through emails and phone calls.  As we all get older, the parting at the end of the visit becomes more meaningful for us all; and it is especially hard to say goodbye to Mom and Dad, knowing as they approach 90 that each embrace could be our last.  My little Mom, once such a strong and guiding force in my younger years now seems smaller every time we meet.  She sits in her recliner doing her best to follow our conversations with the assistance of hearing aids and struggles to find the words to express the thoughts and feelings that must cross the barrier of dementia and be disassembled and reassembled into something her children can decipher.  To see my mother, whose love of words always made her such a precise communicator, unable to remember the words she wants to say is difficult.  To see the woman who taught us all the rules of etiquette cut a bite of pie with her butter knife and then use the knife to bring it to her mouth, licking it clean on both sides before returning it to the table, makes the child in me giggle and the daughter in me realize how unfiltered Mom has become.  I wonder how it is that the chair where she sits and dozes and works Sudoku puzzles has grown a half-size larger since our last visit; and then I remember that it still fits in the same space and that it is Mom who is melting away.  My own maternal instinct flies into full swing as I stand in front of her, smiling, and let her touch my wild curly hair as she exclaims to each new person who enters the room, “Did you see her hair???”  How free it must feel to be unfiltered mom.

Unfiltered Dad is another story altogether.  Dad stayed filtered until a couple of months ago.  Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  I noticed that Dad was having a harder and harder time figuring out how to plan the days of his life with mom.  Then he took a fall; and in the aftermath of falling, his ability to reason seemed to drop off the radar.  Although it has followed his physical healing back to a more functional level, there is a part of Dad’s executive function that remains lost.  He no longer seems able to step back from his own thoughts or behavior and see himself clearly.  Unfiltered Dad is confused, angry, and bitter about growing old.  We have no magic wand to wave that will make him twenty years younger, and his relationship with his children has deteriorated to the point where it is chiefly a gripe session complete with anger that we can’t change the world to accommodate his wishes.  Sadly, Dad’s inability to see himself clearly led him to allow his argument for continuing to drive a car to become the theme of our short time together.  The last day of our family reunion, Dad’s final filter dropped as he launched a personal attack on my youngest sister.  Although each of us expressed our reservations and concerns about our dad driving in the heavy tourist traffic, he singled out one of us as the symbol of his loss and said such hurtful things that it was hard to imagine he hadn’t chosen them with a specific intention to make her suffer.  How that anger must have eaten at Dad behind the filters of clear-headedness.  I suppose unfiltered Dad also feels free, but we see him far differently from the way we view our mom.

I ask myself whether this is the final step in growing up.  Is this the final way that we, the children of our parents, separate from them?  I think of my toddlers and the way that “no” seemed to be the only word they knew.  I think of how I grew in patience as I continued to love them through that stage of life.  I think of my teenagers and the return of opposition as they struggled to find their identities in the midst of the structure we had taught them.  I think of the way they taught me that I had much to learn about patience and love.  I think of the way they taught me to move from “I love you, but…” to “I love you, AND…” in our more adult relationships.  I realize as I reflect on this that my parents could tell the same tale about their own children, and that they were the ones who first modeled for me the part of love that respects who the other person has become and allows for growth and change.  I have relied on my parents for support and encouragement throughout my life.  Now, with no polite filters remaining and no ability to see even one side of a debate with clarity, encouragement has become frustration and respect has turned to confrontation.  I find myself digging deep for the sort of love that saw me through the terrible twos and the terrible teens — my own and those of my children — and I consider whether the unfiltered elderly stage of life is the next chapter in my lifelong learning about love.

When the toddlers said “no,” we loved them.  When the teens fought us in order to declare their independence and become adults, we loved them.  When we fumbled and bumbled through our adult years and needed encouragement, our parents loved us.  Maybe, in the end, all that is left is the love.  Behind the unfiltered final rebellion against the end of life, maybe what we long for and cry out for is simply to be loved — not conditionally, not in spite of who we are, and not even for who we are.  Maybe we cry out to be seen and to be loved simply because we are.  In the end, all that remains is the love; and when the filters are gone, we are challenged to remove the conditions from the love we offer.

I think I may have grown up just a little last weekend.