Hello . . . and Until We Meet Again

Waking Spectre

So you kneel to the grave,

Somber bells beckoning

Buried grief, a sleeping thunder,

That rolls through even your Shadow.

You sweep the dead with a woeful volley of voicelessness.

And you feel that I hear

More that you do not say

And you envision more

That I no longer live;

As I enter this transient spectrum of passage,

I leave you for life

As you leave me—for death.

—something I wrote several years back as I mourned someone I loved.

While I don’t know where this blog will eventually head, during the first few months, I’ll consider topics especially relevant to GenXers (those born between 1965 and 1981) as we meet midlife (that is . . . as we jump over that 40^th birthday and live in the early terrain beyond 40).

Ever since midlife has been seen as an adult developmental stage, those living out midlife have, in their turn, been called “The Sandwich Generation” . . . not because midlife is a time too busy to eat anything other than sandwiches, but because a large number of those in midlife find themselves sandwiched between tending to the care of aging parents and to the care of their own children. Our parents have lived through this age, and now it’s our turn. Of course, more of us have remained unmarried, without children, or have married later or started families later than previous generations, so our sandwich years taste a little different than our parents’ sandwich years did, I guess.

As for me, the one who watched my mom die in the aftermath of a car accident when I was three years old and who then found myself taking care of my dad and younger brother, I’ve been some sort of sandwich most of my life (my husband would probably say a tam and cheese sandwich). Lately I've seen that many of the rest of you are also somewhere in a sandwich, very much in the middle of childhood families and what you've been creating your life to be. Even harder to swallow, I see that our parents are starting to die of natural causes as time passes.

And so we find ourselves living out the sandwich years, learning how to mourn, perhaps for the first time. Our mourning is happening in a fast-paced society that doesn’t have time for death or mourning and that doesn’t even like to say the words “death” or “dying,” almost as though the words were curses. Mourning is not depression, and it isn't weakness to be avoided. It’s a way to honor someone we love who has stepped into the next realm of being, a realm that we will also step into one day. It’s a way of remembering. It’s a way of saying, "Until we meet again . . ." It’s a way of honoring life itself. I've discovered that mourning is life and strength.

A bright yellow wall with red, stenciled letters greets people as they walk into my home, calling out, “LIVE WELL. LAUGH OFTEN. LOVE MUCH.” I think mourning death is part of living well, that the best mourning is done when our faces are tear-streaked and our sides are aching from laughter as we tell funny stories about the person we’ve just ushered into eternity, the person we'll always love.

Question: How does YOUR midlife sandwich taste lately?


This blog post is part of a series of writing (April 3-May 14, 2011) by Tammy Fletcher Bergland about Generation X facing midlife.   tbergland.blogspot.com