I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to write here or anywhere. I’m 55, and until this year, I was fortunate—in a way I didn’t recognize soon enough—to have both my parents alive, active, mentally present, and emotionally available. Then, Mom died in January. Dad died in August.
They were flawed people and flawed parents, but they were good people and did the best they knew how. I believe that. I depended on them too much as an adult sometimes, but they never tried to cling too tight, even when I knew they wished I lived closer to them. They really tried to respect their kids’ rights to live their own lives and figure things out.
So I was lucky they lived so long, and I took it for granted, too. Yet I wasn’t so dependent on Mom and Dad that I could not handle adulthood.
And yet here I am, almost exactly two months after my father died, unable to walk right.
My writerly instincts wanted to end the preceding sentence with “walk.” But I’d be exaggerating. I can walk like normal, but ever since Dad died, it’s been painful. Like I’m not quite doing it right. Every day I struggle with pain and tightness in my hips and random pain in my knee and ankles. Oddly, sometimes the thing that clears it up is walking a bit, but my range of motion is limited, and I can’t recall any other time in my life when some level of pain has been a daily challenge like this. It makes walking at all a test of my will sometimes.
Of course, I’m about to turn 56. I have a congenital disorder, hip dysplasia, which has caused me problems off and on for years. I also worked physically hard while getting my parents’ house ready to sell. I had one flight of steps to climb there and climbed it so much that by the end of the day my Apple Watch thought I’d traversed 21 floors. So maybe this pain and stiffness is natural, and it was always there, but it feels different with my folks gone. Additionally, it’s possible I injured myself in a way I didn’t quite recognize at the time when I was helping move things from my father’s home after he died.
It’s too on the nose for my parents to die and for me to feel like I have to learn how to walk again…but here I am. And it’s not just my actual feet, knees, and hips, but there are days this feeling is perceptual. In mid-late middle age, I must find out who I am in a world where my parents are gone. Of course, I’m sad, and I will miss them until I’m gone myself, but I was also one person while they were here, and now I feel different.
Maybe I always will.
It’s a new week as I finish this. It’s a reflection of this unsettled feeling inside that I’m not sure any of this was worth writing, but I wrote it and committed to sending it out to the world. Consider it my proof of life for October 2023.