The Family Duty

My father and my maternal grandmother never really got along.

He thought her silly and short-sighted, in not having saved more for retirement, and not wanting to save money by living in the finished downstairs area of our house that he had prepared for her, but rather choosing to get her own little house when she moved Upstate. He criticized her for moving so slowly, and for the fact that she had, anecdotally, chosen to buy a new dress over going to college with the money she earned as her high school's valedictorian.

I don't know that my grandmother liked him much better, thinking him unnecessarily callous to my mother, my sister, and I. Her gratitude for him offering weekly transportation to the grocery store withered in her resentment for him rushing her and questioning her expensive purchases and failure to clip coupons.

My father tried to explain the difference between my two grandmothers and their relationship to me. His mother gave me money—admittedly a generous gift for each Christmas and for milestones like finishing high school. My mother’s mother gave me her time. I interpreted a pretty clear value judgment—-that the former was the more meaningful of the two gifts, the latter simply what an old woman had left to give. A conclusion that had always rung hollow to me for my maternal grandmother being my best loved figure growing up, and never having had a real relationship with my paternal one.

Growing up, I didn’t think much about the oddity of the pairing between Dad and Grandma Jean. My mother worked full time, my father was a stay-at-home dad who also became de facto caretaker for my mother’s mother. He drove her for those grocery trips, and eventually handled the bulk of the labor for moves from her little house where I have some of my fondest childhood memories, to senior citizen apartment building, and from there into a nursing home. Despite what appeared to be mutual disdain, these two enormous figures in my childhood world coexisted, and it seemed like an unavoidable part of being. Like so many parts of my childhood, I didn’t question it in the moment, because things were the way they were, and I didn’t have a concept they might look differently.

And it’s as I grew older—particularly after I’d left home for college, and after my mother had left my father and moved out of town, that this pairing grew stranger. When my father made twice-a-week visits to her apartment, not just for grocery shopping, but to have coffee with her and read a newspaper. He explained this to me as a service—that he was keeping her company so she wouldn’t be lonely, though my grandmother did have friends and regular social events put on by her senior living facility, so I had a hard time quite grasping that she needed him there. Concurrently, in the absence of my mother, I suspected he needed the companionship more than her.

But for all of my suspicions, I never heard Grandma complain about this particular dynamic. Maybe she did appreciate the company—I’m embarrassed, now, to think of how rarely I called her after I’d moved out of town. Perhaps all the more so, she saw my father as wounded, and perceived herself to be doing him as much a favor as he was doing her, but had the respect never to say it to anyone.

But then Grandma started slipping.

She literally fell--a stroke--mercifully in the hallway of her apartment building where she’d be found and tended to promptly. Afterwards, she was demonstrably more tired and more forgetful. When she moved into a nursing home, I lived only an hour away and helped with the move, and was able to visit with each of them, not often, but more than I had in college or than I would after I moved out of state. Visiting was hard, though, as it was no longer clear she knew who I was when I stopped in, and later it was difficult to rouse her long enough to have any sort of conversation.

And my father still went to see her, too--much more often than I did. I have to assume he’d given up hope on reconciling with my mother by that point, so there was nothing transactional about his time there, about driving her to off-site doctors’ appointments, or buying her the snacks she requested from the grocery store. As such, it became a relationship that was truly one-sided. My father--the man I’d vilified for much of my childhood for his short temper, quickness to criticize, tight hold on his wallet, and absence of social graces—now the entirely selfless provider and protector for the old woman the rest of our family so rarely made the time for.

I came to recognize a sense of duty there. That people come into each other’s lives for all manner of reasons and have the choice whether or not to give to one another, to sacrifice.

When I think of all of the people in my life who have divorced, all of the people who are estranged, the people who steam and feud over periods of years, I remember this simple lesson. Family’s not a bond that ever disappears entirely, and duty persists long after anyone calls you on it; past the point when anyone’s there to see you’re doing it.

I picture my father, perhaps cooperating with a nurse’s aid, to load my grandmother, barely conscious, into the front seat of his car. I picture him flipping through the pages of a magazine while she has bloodwork done. I picture him arriving back home after all of this, to recognize half the day is gone.

I think to myself, that this right.