A handrail more precisely, the lack of one placed the issue of aging, the physical and emotional deterioration that is its signature and a society’s uneasy relationship with it in stark relief.
I could hear strains of “The Tennessee Waltz,” one of his favorites, from the CD player set up in the yard. With the help of my son and me, my father-in-law, assuming a modified backward crawl position and accompanied by our encouraging yet uncertain chorus of, “We’re almost there, dad,” worked his way down the stairs, expelling groans of discomfort each tortuous step of the way.
The scenario is a familiar one to many baby boomers. As we engage fully in the role reversal that defines the “sandwich” generation parenting not only our own children, but also our parents by helping them negotiate stairs, counseling them through the inevitable surrendering of their driving privileges, doing their grocery shopping, managing their finances and, in too many cases, turning them over to someone else for the kind of continuous, intensive care we no longer can provide we are at once witnesses to and participants in the unfolding of our own futures.
As is often the case, recognition of a complex issue, followed by the first glimmer of understanding, comes not in the form of theory, commentary and analysis, but from simple, sensory experience. While the absence of a handrail temporarily put the issue in doubt, my father-in-law made it down our back steps that day into the embrace of his family and accompanied by Patti Page’s rendition of “The Tennessee Waltz.”
Since then, as I climb or descend those same stairs, I’m reminded of how that missing handrail brought home to me my father-in-law’s and my own physical state and our shared and diminished capacity to help one another.
