A Thankful Prayer

A Thankful Prayer

As we grow up and as we grow old.

By John Schwenkler,  November 23, 2008 I used to see my paternal grandfather every summer, when he’d rent a beach house for the month of July so his thirteen grandkids could have a chance to see their cousins for a week or two. I spent almost the whole month with him the summer after I graduated from college, drinking black coffee in the mornings and scotch or red wine in the evenings, spending the days watching golf and tennis and talking politics and plans for the future. These days, though, the beach house is a thing of the past — the trip from Florida to the Jersey shore is a long one for a man in his late eighties, his grandchildren are mostly grown, and indeed the house itself caught fire shortly after the last summer he rented it.

Disease has taken its toll, too: my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years ago. He has since slowed to a point where the traditional reunion-style gathering would be far too much for him to handle. And so now his children and grandchildren make occasional trips for markedly less chaotic visits to his home on the Gulf of Mexico, where his two daughters cooperate with round-the-clock hired help to prepare his meals and walk him through his daily routines.

My wife and I returned the other day from taking our one-year-old son, Jack, down to Florida to spend a few days with my grandfather before traveling up to Virginia for Thanksgiving with our nuclear families. Despite his tiredness and obvious physical and cognitive limitations, Jack’s great-grandpa is still surprisingly mobile — and often quite attuned to what is going on around him. On the whole, though, he is only barely recognizable as the man who taught me always to grip firmly and look a man squarely in the eyes as you shake his hand. And so we left, as we have the last two times we made this trip, heavy with the recognition that this could be the last such visit, but still quite aware that the prospect of watching his first great-grandchild continue to grow is exactly the sort of thing that could keep my grandfather going for months or years to come.

The trajectory of a disease like Parkinson’s is a painful thing to observe, and I’ve witnessed something similar before in the loss of my maternal grandmother to Alzheimer’s. A straightforwardly physical downturn is one thing — who hasn’t had to endure an elderly relative’s complaints about swollen ankles and the water in her knee? — but cognitive and neurological struggles are in a class of their own; my mother’s father, despite a roster of maladies including near-total blindness, could tell stories of the Great Depression right up to the end, while this last week’s trip had more than its share of conversations that barely lasted a few seconds at a time. But the challenges of this disease are something my wife and I will have to get accustomed to: my dad’s twin brother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly before our wedding, and my mother received the same diagnosis earlier this year.

Our son, though, manages to be blissfully unaware of all of this: talk isn’t yet his forte anyway, and he can run laps around the living room just fine even if the adults in it aren’t managing to say much. In his limited vocabulary, “Great-Grandpa Joe” has been shortened to “Joe,” and over the course of our few days in Florida the usual early caginess around a new face gradually gave way to a willingness to go in for handshake lessons and even a quick kiss. Almost every time Jack entered the room, the near-expressionless face that is one of the most heartbreaking characteristics of Parkinson’s turned quickly to a bright-eyed grin, radiating joy as well as richly-deserved pride in having lived to witness three generations of his descendants.

At mass on Sunday, my eyes welled with tears as we walked ahead of my grandfather on our way to receive communion. Jack then went to sit with his mother, and I knelt for a few minutes with a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder. It was tempting to think of death, but much more appropriate simply to rejoice in life — and I can only hope my parents’ eldest grandchild will have the honor of paying a similar sort of visit to them some day. There is quite a lot to pray for, and many thanks to give as well: for both a life well lived and another one quickly gathering speed in its wake.