This blog is a supplement to our Family Engagement Newsletter written each month by Tanya Robin Fisher, Collaboration for Early Childhood Family Ambassador. Thanks for being here!
As we packed the car with a cooler full of road snacks, bathing suits and roller skates for our annual end-of-summer road trip, we had learned that my 84-year-old mother-in-law had taken a turn for the worse. My husband had visited her in the hospital the day before, but she had been released and seemed to be improving. She insisted that we take our summer trip, and although we were ambivalent, we did. We knew better than to argue with Abi, as my kids affectionately called their Abuela. Then, on a boat, in the blazing sun, I got a text saying that she was now on home hospice. By the first day of school, less than a week later, she was no longer responsive.
It was a big week in our house.
My oldest was starting high school, and my other kid, an incoming fifth grader, was ecstatic to be “the apex predator—in a good way—of her school” (her words). There were new routines to implement, after-school activities to start, curriculum nights to attend, forms to fill out (so many forms), schedules to learn, locker codes and passwords to memorize, gym clothes to remember, and all the usual beginning-of-the-school-year logistics.
Holding all of it at once felt a little like juggling two oranges and a flaming blade while trying to do a quadratic equation in my head.
My kids’ lives were opening like doors on The Price Is Right, while Abuela’s world had narrowed to one room. Her sister and adult children were by her side 24/7, with extended family members coming and going—rubbing her arms, brushing the hair from her face, keeping her mouth moist, and sharing stories. The room was full of love, expressed in the smallest ways.
The start of any school year seems to demand constant action from parents. Buy the supplies. Learn the schedule. Fill out the forms. Find the missing water bottle. Figure out how everyone is getting where they need to be with the right combination of backpack/lunch/snack/gym shoes/dance shoes. It feels like we have this small window to set the stage for a successful year.
There is something reassuring about all that doing. It gives us the illusion that if we anticipate enough and prepare enough, we have some modicum of control.
I know it is an illusion, and yet I am very susceptible to it. I tend to believe—or at least act as if—enough preparation and the right snacks can solve almost anything.
But dying asks something very different of us. In that, that is nothing we could organize our way out of. Nothing we can put on a calendar or research or solve. There is very little to do except be present. And bring snacks.
Somewhere along the way I started confusing good parenting with staying three steps ahead. We pack lunches, make appointments, drive places, advocate, remember, anticipate, and fix. We are constantly trying to smooth the road ahead for the kids we love. I wonder how much of my children’s lives I have experienced that way—not missing it exactly, but already mentally halfway into the next thing while I’m still living this one.
That first week back at school, our family seemed to be living both truths at once. My kids needed us beside them—with reminders, lunches and just enough scaffolding to help them feel confident—as they moved toward what was next. Abuela needed us anchored with her in the present. For once, I did not want to get to what came next, because I knew that in what came next, she would no longer be there.
All we had was the present. And maybe that was one last gift from Abuela: she made us stop rushing toward what came next and pay closer attention to what was here right now. And for once, I stayed there. My kids did too.