Grandma, Kinkeeping, and the Birthday Book

One of my most cherished possessions is my grandmother's small 1980 datebook. It lists the birthdays of all her children, their spouses, her grandchildren, their spouses, and her great-grandchildren. All of us could absolutely count on a card from Grandma on our birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. She always enclosed a dollar for her grandchildren and great grandchildren; she was on a strict budget and we cherished her generosity. If you hadn't received a card from Grandma Nolan, you must have gotten confused about your birthday She had 8 children, 31 grandchildren, and 23 great-grandchilden when she died at age 86 in 1985.

Mary Catherine was born in 1898 and left school after eighth grade. One of her first jobs was to mount women's combs on cards. She married my grandfather, James Nolan, a widowed lawyer with a toddler son, at age 22. She had seven children, four sons and three daughters; she raised her stepson as her own. Tragically one daughter died before she was two. Her husband died when she was 40; her children ranged from 17 to 2. He had been sick for 7 years; his chronic illness made it impossible for him to secure life insurance. After his death, she discovered his filing cabinet was full of unpaid bills from poor clients. Grandma had lost her parents the year before. Abruptly, they were very poor She collected rent from three small apartments in Brooklyn, but the apartments were the source of endless headaches. She worked in a laundromat. The older children helped support the family. My mom had to attend secretarial school rather than college.

Grandma was a very loving, giving, ingenious, frugal single mother. All her children turned out well--two lawyers, two teachers, a nurse, a social worker, a computer programmer. She was unavailingly there to help out when babies were born, when someone was sick, when someone was in crisis. A very religious woman, she was empowered by her deep faith. A lifelong Democrat, she voted in the first election open to women. She was always fascinated by world affairs and extremely knowledgeable about them. I could talk to her about anything.

In Becoming Grandmothers, Sheila Kitzinger describes the grandmother's role as the "kin-keeper." I have been understudying that role since my family lived with my grandma during the first two years of my life. I am the oldest girl cousin, just like my mom and grandmother were the oldest girls in their families. Grandmothers do emotional work. They sustain and nourish the family's kinship, keeping everyone connected with one another. This is a greater challenge now when families are far-flung and both parents are working grueling schedules. There is very little time left over for extended families.

I take absolutely seriously my commitment to follow my grandmother and mother, two strong, loving, generous matriarchs. Grandma knows the family's addresses, phone numbers, birthdays. Grandma informs the family if anyone is sick or in trouble, is engaged, lost a job, is pregnant. In the event of a family death, she alwasys knows the funerael arrangements. Grandma opens her house for family parties and reunions, no matter the state of her housekeeping or budget. Grandma can always identify the people in those old pictures and knows where the family skeletons are buried.

I have 5 brothers, 5 sister-in-laws, 11 neices and nephews, 5 of whom are married. I had a grandniece and a grandnephew. Twice a year I revise the extended family directory, prying the information out of everyone. We established a family email list, sharing news and pictures, so we all know what is happening in our lives, even if we don't see each other often enough. I do more of the communicating than anyone else, but I consider that my responsibility. My husband and I are the only family elders on Facebook; we have discovered that is how to keep track of our neices and nephews and see their latest pictures..

I have seen both my mother's and father's formerly close knit family disperse once the family matriarch dies. My extended family is scattered all over the East Coast, from Maine to North Carolina, so it is a challenge to keep us close. Fortunately, we have had six family weddings since my mom's death 4 years ago, so they have been family reunions as well. By next February, there will have been 6 babies in two years.

When I was taking care of mother 24/7 during the last three years of her life, I scanned thousands of old family photos and slides. My husband, a computer programmer, wrote software for many family picture sites. His software enabled me to caption the photos and arrange them in chronological order. Pictures that family members had never seen were freed from boxes and closets and available to everyone anytime.capacity. At my mother's wake, we were able to show a slideshow of her life, with pictures from 1921 to 2004.

As I learn to grandmother, my Grandma Nolan is my inspiration and role model. Looking through her date book always brings back new memories of love, humor, kindness, and understanding.

Growing Up in 50s, Early 60s

Comparing my life with my parents' life, I realize  they were far more rooted in the community and virtually immune to the seductions of consumerism. Raising six kids and sending them to Catholic schools on one middle-class income, they had to stetch every dollar. A pound of chuck fed 8. We didn't get a TV until I was 14; we got a mediocre audio system at about the same time. The radio was our main entertainment. I recall the thrill of my own radio as a birthday present when I was 10; I could listen to Dodger games whenever I wanted. Movies were a luxury; we ate out about twice a year, usually when someone graduated.

We had fun visiting family and friends. On Sundays we often visited my nearby aunt and uncle and watched Disneyland. All of my 45 first cousins were an easy drive away. There were countless Christening, First Communion, Confirmation, Graduation parties. We had frequent family picnics with terrific softball games for all ages.

There were gangs of kids in the neighborhood to play baseball, shoot baskets, play badmitten, volleyball. Someone's basement had ping pong or a pool table. There was no extra money for music or dance lessons or gymnastic lessons. Starting at 12, babysitting was my income, enabling me to go to NYC to see Broadway shows twice a month.

Summers we swam int he high school swimming pool or went to Jones Beach by bus. We had a huge backyard, so all of the neighbors' kids hung out there. There were no girls in the immediate neighborhood, so I was always one of the guys. I had memorized the baseball rule book. My brothers would challenge their friends to stump me with baseball questions. They couldn't.

We learned how to take the bus by the time we were 8. We used our bicycles for transportation. My parents only had one car. My mom used to drop off and pick up my father at the railroad station, so she could have the car for the day. My parents were too busy to play chauffeur. We were far less supervised and much more self-sufficent than kids are today. On the other hands there were always parents around to keep an eye on all the neighborhood kids. People felt free to admonish children not their own or report bratty behavior to their parents. When sister said in our Catholic school was upheld and reinforced by our parents.

Card playing was the way adults socialized. Almost every adult was competent at cards, and many were excellent bridge players. My parents played bridge with friends once a week. We used to creep down the stairs to hear the kibitzing. Every home had a card table. People almost always had a deck in their bag or their pocket if you had to wile away time. Periodically my family discovers there is no cheaper or more varied form of free entertainment than card playing.

My parents were devout Catholics, genuinely good people with a stalwart faith. When they moved to Long Island after my dad came home from the war, our home town was just potato fields. Schools, churches, community organizations had to be built. St. Martha's, the local Catholic parish, met in a nineteenth century building that became the volunteer library after the church was built. My parents and their friends worked tirelessly to raise money for a church, a school for 800 kids, a convent for the nuns, and a rectory for the priests.That represented huge generosity by Catholics in a modest, working-class community.

My mom and dad were tremendously involved in social action outreach with the local Catholic Church. My dad was head of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, which ministers to poor struggling families in the parish. He visited the local nursing home every Sunday without fail. They visited parish families in need once a week. Some evenings he was called out to visit a family experiencing a sudden emergency.

The local library was run by volunteers for the first ten years. I had been infected by my parents' community spirit. When the library was vandalized when I was 9, I volunteered two times a week to sort it out. I remember the chief volunteer struggling to explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction. My best friend and I also established the first library in our grade school. I spent four summer working as the children's librarian in high school. With no professional librarians, I had freedom to create entertaining children's programming.

My parents upheld their commitment to social justice for their entire lives. They taught me what real religious faith was.mom's obituary described her as a trailblazer. She wasn't able to go to college after high school. Her father died and Mary had to go to secretarial school, though all five brothers finished college. Mom stayed home with her six children from 1945 to 1963, always actively involved in the community as a volunteer and a leader. When my youngest brother started first grade, she went to college, graduating the same day I did in 1967. A student of the 60s, she became a fervent feminist. After getting her master's degree, she taught high school history. Her obituary described her as a teacher, activist, and trailblazer.

My mother bore no resemblance to the stereotyped 1950s housewife. Neither did my aunts or my friends' mothers. They had their big families when they were very young andd when back to college and career when in their early forties. The second wave of feminism belittled their intelligent commitment and generosity.

I am not romanticizing my childhood, just trying to describe how I experienced it.

Photos and Memories

I have always been intrigued by the relationship between our memories and the old photographs we have frequently seen.

The three pictures above illustrate my point. The picture of my uncles and their friends was taken at Thansgiving. Showing them these pictures elicited many stories about how they did not go trick or treating at Halloween. Instead, they dressed up as hobos at Thanksgiving. Several had forgotten about it until I showed them the picture. The second shows me holding court with my young uncles and their friends; I was treated as their little sister. I don't remember living with my grandma and my 5 uncles and 1 aunt for the first two years of my life. But that picture has shaped my view of my early life and helped me understand my fascination with family history. The third picture shows my dad, me, and my brother Richard in the garden. I did not remember how very involved we used to be in dad's lifelong gardening.But the picture evoked many memories, such as of plucking Japanese bettles off roses and throwing them in the small can of oil.

I have more than 50 boxes of slides as well as about 30 photo albums, going back to the 1920s. During the four years I cared for my mother 24/7, I scanned thousands of family photos and created family picture sites. Immersing myself in the family history, I certainly remembered much I had forgotten.But do I remember the actual event or do I remember the slides of the event? Do I remember clearly what was never photographed? Discussing the picture websites with the whole family did elicit everyone's memories, which then became incorporated into individual memories.

I fondly remember countless slide shows with everyone in my immediate and extended family.There was always screams of laughter and frequent admonitions to the kids to to stop standing between the projector and the screen and making shadow puppets. I recall Mom's telling me Richard  was showing his girlfriend the family slides. I suspected correctly that she would call back a few hours later to announce their engagement. I encouraged my future husband to watch the family slides on his second visit to New York in 1996:) I gauge the seriousness of potential family mates by how immersed they were in the family photos. When we first met Dan's future wife Anna in 2001 and observed her photo fascination, we patiently waited for the announcement of their engagement in 2007.

Yet the pictures distort the reality of our everyday life. We got a few toys at Christmas, but we never played with them. We went away on vacation the entire summer. In the summer we lived in the water, either in the pool or at the beach; in the winter there was always abundant snow. We were always outside, never inside. We never played ping pong or knock hockey. We never played board games that ended with some poor sport upsetting the board once his loss became inevitable. (I was always a good sport because I was usually winning.)

Much of our outside play is neglected. We never played badminton; we never played baseball; we never went ice skating; we never had sleds; we never rode bicycles. We did play basketball in the driveway unless the next door neighbor was complaining to the cops about evening play. Richard never ran cross country. Several brothers were photographed in football regalia, but there was no proof they actually played on a high school team. One broken leg is honored, but not a broken arm. We were very religious; we spent an inordinate amount of time receiving our communion and being confirmed. However, we never went to church at other times. I never wore glasses; that is an outstanding accomplishment given that I got my glasses at 10 and my contact lenses at 19.

We only graduated from school; we never attended it. There are no pictures of our schools or our teachers. You would never realize we attended three different high schools and three different grammar schools. According to the pictures, we never studied, never read a book, never went to the library, never participated in any after school activity. Richard was a drummer; I was a baton twirler. Peter started playing the accordion at his second weddin in 1989, not in 1961. Our family pets are very neglected. I gave up trying to figure out how many cats we had and what they looked like. Families who call their cats "cat" don't waste film on them.

Relationships are neglected. Mom and Dad never kissed one another after their wedding or hugged us after babyhood. During our childhood we always wore pajamas for photographs. Dad was rarely there because he was always behind the camera. Mom was never pregnant or nursing, an accomplishment even more amazing than my never wearing glasses. No one was ever filthy, battered, bloody. The siblings related to each other by lining up in size order. We must have photographed every single occasion when my brothers wore jackets and ties. Only certain children got birthday parties. The last three brothers barely existed.

Photo therapy is neglected in the treatment of elders suffering from dementia. My mom was never the same cognitively after a terrible fall down the stairs, landing on her head. I made her a photo website, with 400 pictures captioned and arranged in chronological order. We watched the slideshow countless times, and consequently she was always able to remember the important people she loved and the significant milestones in her life.

I wonder what impact the digital camera will have on memories. We now take pictures of everyday life, not just state occasions. We already have over 1500 pictures of my 15-month-old grandson, far more than my parents took of all of us from 1945 to 1985. Anticipating two granddaughters this year, I am in the market for an external hard drive. My grandchildren won't have to rely on memory; their whole lives will have been photographed.

Mothers, Lawyers, Politics

My mother had 6 children and 15 grandchildren. Born in 1921, she wanted to be a lawyer. Her father died when she was 17, and she had to go to secretarial school, not college. Her family required her financial support. From 1945, she raised 6 kids, was an active volunteer in her church and community. When my youngest brother was 5, she returned to college, graduated the same day I did in 1967, became a fervent feminist, got her master's degree in American History, and taught high school. 

After she retired, she worked for Bread for the World, an international organization fighting world hunger. When my dad developed Alzheimer's Disease, she became a support group leader, then the Long Island legislative lobbyist for the Alzheimers Association. Later she became a lobbyist for long-term health care. She was an officer of the Women's Ordination Conference, fighting for women priests. She would have been a superb congresswoman or senator, much more effective because she didn't go to law school. Her obituary characterized her as a trailblazer.

I was raised Roman Catholic and have 45 younger first cousins.

 Like my mother, my aunts, their friends, my friends' mothers could not afford to attend college before they had children. They had their large families very young, then got their degrees and started their careers by the time they were in their early forties. Since their children were largely grown, they were able to focus their tremendous energy, talent, and experience on their jobs.At that time being a mother of a large family was considerably more respected than it is now. My grandmother had 8 children; my mother had 6; I had 4. The extensive volunteer executive experience of my mother and my aunts was more likely to be acknowledged. My aunt went to law school when she was 40 and in a few years was chief counsel to the president of a large university. Now even many professional women don't seem to value women who chose to emphasize mothering instead of careers while their children were young.

I stayed home with my children full-time for 14 years, then got two master's degrees. I was a political activist, editor, childbirth educator, breastfeeding and parenting counselor, researcher, nursery school vice president and treasurer, PTA leader, volunteer teacher and librarian, mental health advocate. i Even in the traditionally female fields of library science and social work, I often felt that my experience as a mother and community activist was not acknowledged and valued. In social work school, I often was regarded as a beginner, and the tremendous amount of knowledge I had gained by reading, childrearing, and counseling, activism was regarded as cheating, because I hadn't put in the requisite years on the job.On the job,. I was given the responsibilities of an experienced librarian and social worker, but paid and promoted like a beginner.

Ann Crittenden has a provocative book, If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything." Anyone who doesn't think PTA activism is political experience has not been involved in Long Island PTAs:) Mothers' executive experience seems invisible to most people because they are not highly paid.

We need to broaden our conception of political experience. We cannot draw our political leadership from graduates of Yale and Harvard Law Schools. Sixty US Senators are lawyers. That certainly rules out most people, who could not possibly afford law school. How much of the adversial, partisan character of our politics is shaped by the exceess of lawyers? A Congress of PTA presidents would be considerably more effective.

Women need not follow the traditionally male path to political power. Otherwise they have to be Hillary Clinton's age before they can aim for major office and then are dismissed as too old, too entrenched in the status quo.

Women who have raised families are the most untapped resource for political talent. The mother bloggers who list a truly impressive list of achievements and experiences, claiming that doesn't make them qualified for being vice president are undervaluing themselves. Women who run for political office are relatively successful. The problem is most women, not graduates of elite law schools, aren't confident enough to run because work that mostly women do is often unrecognized and even scorned. 

Giving Her Children Wings

My mom's combination of fearlessness, faith in God, and experience with five brothers made her wonderful mother of boys. She didn't worry; she didn't clip any wings. She didn't let little things like sons on the roof or a son out of touch hiking the Appalachian trail for months upset her. Richard and Stephen look so pleased with themselves, without any fear they might fall off or get in trouble. Her shy, timid, anxious daughter was a mystery to her:)

What is a mystery to me is how she escaped anxiety. Her mother and her sister are champion worries. Her baby sister Veronica died before she was 2 when my mom was 5. Her dad was sick throughout her teen years and died when she was 17. His death ended her college dreams.

What she did effortlessly, I have had to struggle with every day of my 42 years as a mother. All my daugters are braver and more adventurous than I am. For the most part, my anxieties have not infected them. They respect my fears. They always call, email, or text when the plane lands, at any hour, in any part of the world. Flight Tracker is my friend.

Mary and Joe: World War II Love Story

My parents, Joseph and Mary , met in August 1942. My dad was drafted into the army in November. From November 1942 until February 1946 they wrote every day. They saved all of their letters; I have about 2000 of them, meticulously arranged in chronological order. Slowly I am transcribing them for a blog.

My daughter Rose tell her grandparents' story:

"In my grandmother's house, past a stone Mexican statue named Harry, up the front stairs and to the right there is a bedroom. In this bedroom there are a pea green carpet, a bed with yellow and orange flowered sheets, and a cracked blue dresser. This dresser, unlike every other bureau and closet in this house, does not contain any seventies-style ties, old scarves, or early feminist t-shirts. Instead every drawer is filled with letters.

Joe lived in Jamaica, Queens, with his parents and six younger sisters and brothers. His college yearbook said of him, "Even his own brilliance could not fathom the enigma that is Joe." Mary lived in Queens Village. She was the second child, and the oldest girl, in a family of seven. Her high school yearbook described her as, "Sincerity coupled with bubbling vivacity, scholastic excellence with literary talents, athletic prowess, sparkling wit." She would not have a college yearbook until many years later, because her father had died without much life insurance when she was seventeen years old. Her father's brother squeezed together the money for her older brother to continue school at St. John's, but Mary was just a girl.

Mary and Joe had met the summer of 1942, on a raft at Loon Lake in the Adirondacks. He was 28, she was 21. A week later, back in Queens, he took her to see Bambi. They saw each other often in the three months after Bambi became Prince of the forest, and before Joe was drafted. He kissed her for the first time on the day he left for the army. From November 1942 until he came home in February 1946.

They will get engaged the night before her 22nd birthday in August 1943 and will marry the next March. The wedding will not be fancy, since it was planned in about four days and no one had much money anyway. The reception will be in Mary's backyard. Joe will go off to war in Europe, though his bad vision will ensure that he never faces combat. They will have their first child while he is away. There will be short letters to Baby Mary Jo, my mother, enclosed with the longer ones to Mary. Then in 1946, when Mary Jo is eight months old, Joe will finally come home and the letters will end."

For their tenth anniversary, my dad wrote one more letter describing their love story.

"Her name was Mary, of course. She was a blue-eyed, smiling, long-legged, cool looking girl--a trifle naive. A girl with class he thought when he first saw her, but young. A bus seems an awful place for things to start, but there was she on a bus going to church and planning to have a chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkelettes. He was going to church too, but she sat in back of him and that was that.

He said hello to her that afternoon or more likely she said hello to him. Again nothing happened--there are lots of shapely girls in blue bathing suits at a lake summer resort. The summer resort was one of those let’s-be-one’big-happy-family sort of places--it even had a social director and a social directrix. Naturally one afternoon there was a baseball game in which all the boys and girls (in those places they’re all boys and girls even if the boys and girls have big boys and girls of their own) were to participate. Well this particular boy and girl were antisocial or mutually social. They sat out the ball game on a raft.

They talked about prosaic things--families and schools; after all he was a shy young man. She wasn’t. Maybe that is why he was sure it happened then. That’s the trouble with shy young men: they are not used to openhearted friendliness. He never knew what she saw in him, but for the rest of the week they were summer friends. He struggled a little bit--an inherent male instinct. Why one rainy afternoon they went to a Bing Crosby movie in separate groups. They had only a week, not even a full one.

However, this time it did happen on a bus. They had made some sort of plan to ride back to New York on the same bus. He from the summer resort, she from Albany where she was visiting. He was positive. She says it couldn’t haven happened then--that soon.

He didn’t know the proper method of courting a girl, not a beautiful one like her. Oh he was quite proper. The movies he took her to were always approved for adults and children. A baseball game, a few football games, a little bowling--that was about all. He didn’t have much time, altogether three months. He then went away as did twelve million other men young and old. Oh yes, he finally kissed her once. He was very proper and very shy and afraid she would say no.

He did have a secret weapon. His job had been writing letters under constricting rules. He now could write letters without rul3s. She claims it was all platonic yet her first letter to him was a sixteen-page affair. Looking back he is smiling at the strategy of the salutation of his letter. First it was a proper Dear Mary--it’s possible to write the same two words so they are less proper but more warm. She should have realized what his plans were right from the very beginning. The first thing he did was change her name,, he first name that is. How could he ever have written letters beginning Dear Marie.

Three months of seeing her, three months of exchanging letters and she was sure too. A little later--less than a year after they first met, it was properly formalized. She got a ring (It was not in a car; it was outside on the sidewalk in front of her house). The ratio was changed. One kiss in three months to how many kisses in two weeks? Not enough, there will never be enough. His heart was just too full--that time was a blur to him. Did it happen to her as it did to him? There was no beginning. It just always was. Just two he and she.

Of course they were going to be engaged for a long time, and it was a long time. Six months and twenty-six days. One could say he was respoinsible. Too much of his heart got into one of his letters and now slipped in. But she was more direct and she knew her hussyness. She met his train and before they got home it was all decided. And then for a week they didn’t see each other, well hardly at all. A girl has a lot to do before here wedding. Some girls take months and months. This girl did it all in a week. Besides he not knowing that (not clear)

Married on Monday. What plain words. Rainbow isn’t a fancy word either. Nor sunris ,nor moonlight. Love and sacrement--a sacrament of love. For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two but one flesh.”

The happiness of their marriage is captured in this photo of my mother's graduation from Hofstra University in June, 1967, the same day I graduated from Fordham. Their six children were then 21, 20, 18, 14, 11, and 9.

Aging and Dependency

My mom and my husband Andy, 2002. The Swedish rollator kept her out of a wheelchair

Baby boomers often seem to believe that if they eat right, exercise daily, keep intellectually active, retire at 75, volunteer daily, they will never be frail old people, dependent on others. Until four years before she died in 2004, my mom was extremely independent. She lived alone, she drove, she traveled all over the world, she walked, she did yoga, she lobbied in DC and Albany for Alzheimer's Disease and long-term health care, she helped care for her 15 grandchildren, she virtually ran her local Catholic parish.

She was the helper, never the helped. Asking for or accepting help was almost impossible for her. She was the model of successful aging. My oldest daughter once marveled, "I can even accept that you and dad might die. But Grandma is immortal." In an eloquent tribute to my mom, my daughter Rose points out she was always moving. My mom never seemed anxious or depressed; she coped with negative feelings by activity. As her health and life fell apart very quickly, she wasn't comfortable expressing her fears or grief. I often wondered if she had adequately mourned her little sister who died when she was 5, her father who died when she was 17, her husband who died of Alzheimer's Disease when she ws 65.

Everyone admired and reinforced her independence; ironically it made her aging more difficult for everyone concerned. My mom developed Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a Parkinson-plus neurological disorder; it destroyed her balance and she started to fall. She refused to make accommodations to her growing disability.

In January 2000, she fractured her pelvis on a trip to Israel. She was walking up a slippery cobblestone hill in the rain. She walked around Israel for a week with a fractured pelvis. I only knew what had happened after a friend drove her home from the airport.

For about two years, I had been trying to convince her and my brothers that her driving ability was serious compromised. In April 2000 she totaled the car and broke her sternum. She lost control of the car after colliding with a lawn service truck. Fortunately no schoolchildren were walking on the sidwalk when her car jumped the curb and crashed into a hedge.

Werenovated my house so she could move in with me. A in-house garage was converted into a first-floor bedroom, so she never had to climb stairs. We added a ramp to the front door. Then she broke her arm in physical therapy; bored with the exercise bike, she decided to try the trampoline, balanced on one foot, and didn't hold on. Two months later she fractured her ribs trying to move a television set.

In 2001, visiting my brother, she fell from the top of his stairs and suffered serious brain damage. She was never herself again. For the last three years of her life, she was totally dependent on her family and home health aides for all activities of daily living; she could never be left alone. If alone, she would inevitably do something that made her fall. At night we used both a baby monitor and a motion detector. If she had been able to accept her need for help, she might have avoided the falls and head injuries that so compromised her quality of life.

My parents took care of my grandmother the last 5 years of her life. Mom thought that her mom had taken a defeatist attitude toward her arthritis, taken to her chair, and given up her formerly active life. She told me she struggled to remember "what a great woman mom had been." My mother was never going to be like her mom; exercise, yoga, great diet would all prevent that. But my grandmother lived four years longer than my mother did, and taking care of her was relatively easy. She remained the loving, wise grandmother who was a great listener; she lived to know 23 great grandchildren. She was always extremely careful and never fell.

If my mom had been more cautious, she might shave lived to see six grandchildren married and meet three great-grandchildren. Anne, my oldest daughter, has told me countless times in the 20 months of her son's life how much she misses Grandma. I used to tell my mom, "Mom, so many of your grandkids are just on the cusp of marriage and parenthood. Isn't seeing Mommy Anne worth letting us take care of you?"

Our generation is being encouraged to think we can defeat aging. The US can't cope with dependency at the beginning or end of life. Graciously letting people take care of you can be the most loving gift you can give them. All of us constantly struggle with being able to ask for and accept help. When I recently injured my knee, I hated to ask my husband for the help he is happy to give.

Even though it was challenging, I have always been glad I was able to welcome my mom into my home and give back a small part of what she had given to her family, her friends, the world. My then new husband Andywas wonderful with her. Since he hadn't known the super Mary, he could love the reduced Mary without mourning what was no longer there. People used to assume he was mom's son; mom get confused explaining she wasn't English.

So many parents of my friends and so many of my aunts and uncles begin to need significant help as they near 80. Independence is a desirable goal of human development, but most of us have long periods of dependency at the beginning and end of life. Realistically accepting and planning for the probable dependence of aging may be one of the baby boomers' hardest challenges.

New York City

I am jealous when I read accounts of OS friends meeting in California or DC for the inauguration. I am in Manhattan 3 days a week. there 3 days a Anyone who is interested in getting together in NYC, please send me a message.

I have no sense of how many OS contributors live anywhere near New York City or Long Island.