Dominos

Six years ago today I was just 19 miles from here at The Plains in Oneonta where Dad’s life was ending.  Mom had died just 14 months earlier in their home in Sharon, Connecticut. Tamar and Aviva persuaded Dad that he couldn’t live there alone, and Aviva and Peter found a lovely place for him in the assisted living facility near them at The Plains.  Dad had a pretty good year there, with a romance.  He charmed the staff, as he had been charming people all his life, and sang with the pianist in the dining room. Peter and Aviva were in Panama that winter, but they came back to find Dad going rapidly downhill.  There was nothing physically wrong with him, but he wasn’t thriving and was beginning to refuse to eat. As his condition got much worse, I flew out. It’s funny, I remember some things so clearly about that visit, about Dad’s last hours, but I don’t remember if he knew I was there.  My best recollection is that he had already slipped into unconsciousness. He had just decided to die, and had stopped eating completely several days before.  I remember how glad I was to be with Aviva, how sweet and caring the staff was, how pleasant Dad’s little apartment was. I remember taking my turn sitting beside Dad, sometimes stroking his papery hand, while Aviva caught a little nap in the sitting room. Perhaps I dozed a little. I woke for his last breath.  He was a couple of months shy of his 92nd birthday.

I think of my parents often, and mostly I remember what great parents they were – how they loved and supported us, how they encouraged us to become ourselves, how they showed us a big, beautiful, fascinating world.  They each certainly had their faults, and Dad’s, like everything in his life, were large.  But I was shaped so much more by their strengths than by their weaknesses. I inherited Dad’s optimism and self confidence, and I inherited Mom’s love of nature and her ability to do nothing but look at it for long stretches of time.

At Dad’s death Tamar, Aviva and I became the trustees of the family property in Amenia, with the six grandchildren to become successor trustees when we were all gone. The nine of us had an interest in that much loved, magical place, a legal and financial interest, but also a huge emotional interest. But it was complicated.  We were spread across the country, with very different access to the property.  And as were were at different stages of our lives and in different circumstances, we had different levels of ability to continue to support the place let alone do the work it really needed. It was a case study in deferred maintenance. When we gathered there for Dad’s memorial, we agreed to hold onto the place for the time being, to give ourselves time to see what Amenia was like without Mom and Dad, to test our commitment to it and our ability to manage it together.

We held on to Amenia for four years, until the spring of 2016. It’s a tribute to everyone in the family, and to Mom and Dad who had such a big influence on all of us, that the decision to sell it and the sale itself were made without rancor, even though it was a bitter pill for some.  Happily, we sold it to friends – and lovely people – so we can still drive in to have a look at the lake or to walk up the road from time to time.  I was there last fall and saw the empty places where the big house and the little house (for guests) had been.  The space seemed oddly small – as if it could not possibly have held all the happy people who cooked, ate, cleaned, played scrabble, argued politics, napped, slept, identified birds, gazed at the moon and stars, and healed whatever wounds the big world had inflicted. I recovered from my divorce there, and years later from the death of my beloved Joe. The trees we planted, starting with the tree for Keely, the first grandchild, were still where we left them.  A new house was rising in a much better setting, overlooking the lake. But only  the memories belong to us now.

With the sale of Amenia, a fifth domino fell for me – Shayne’s death in 2005, Joe’s in 2007, Mom’s in 2011, Dad’s in 2012, and then the sale of Amenia, my base on the east coast, in 2016. Amenia had been the place where I could visit east coast family without being a guest, and I found that it had been more important to me than I had expected to have that home base where I could be with my sisters and the next two generations of our families.  So when Jay found much to like in Cooperstown, I realized how much I wanted a new base in that familiar country. But it wasn’t until we found Sunnyhill that I realized how much I also wanted that Amenia quiet, a place to see the moon and stars, a place to watch birds and see deer and a fox, a place where you had to go to town because you weren’t in town. My place in the world started shifting with Shayne’s death, and the shift continued through the losses of the next decade.  There were huge gains in that time too, Jay and the family he brought, Liz’s marriage to Sean and the family that brought, being Grandma and Bubbe. But the losses left me hungry for the peace I had always had in Amenia.

So I am here, just 19 miles from where Dad died six years ago, looking out at a view he and Mom would have loved, watching bluebirds and swallows contest nesting spaces, watching robins and crocuses, watching winter end and spring begin.