Segue

 "You’re an orphan now," the pastoral worker said to me, as we sat with my father after he died.   I remember staring at her, confused.  I was fifty-eight years old.  I couldn’t consider myself an orphan.  Could I?  "Both your parents are gone now," she added.

I was heartbroken.  And unsettled in my heartbreak.  My father was one hundred years old.  He had been very ill for six months, and no longer lived with us.  His death was not unexpected.  It had just been unexpected that day.  I had collapsed at the side of the bed, holding his hand, saying, "I’m sorry.  I’m sorry."  I wasn’t there in his last moments. 

I always assumed I would be.    At seven in the morning of what would be his last day, when I popped in on the way to work, he was still sleeping.  His mouth was open and a little askew.  For a brief moment, I paused.  I thought of my mother on her last morning.   That day, though, I was only five minutes away.   When the call came for Papa, at eleven o’clock later that morning,  I was half an hour away plus organization time to advise the school administration and gather my things.  He had already passed when I hurtled into his room.    I was so profoundly shaken.  Guilt, I thought.    It must be guilt.  Maybe partly, on reflection.   In the end, though, guilt encrypted the real issue filed away in the subconscious.

The encryption code itself was innocuous.  Just a meme with the words, You look around and realize there is no shoulder for you to lean on.   I am an orphan.  I’m the child no longer.  I’m always the parent now,  the  Elder.  Parents listen to the stories, they encourage, they praise, they accept.  Their support is unconditional.  They are there in the beginning, and they know you in a way no one else ever will.   When they are gone, the torch passes. 

That means I’m the shoulder now.  The bulwark.  The person who listens, encourages, praises, supports.   It’s my turn.   My parents did it for me.  They modeled the role, and it’s up to me to pay it forward.  I am almost entirely comfortable with this.   Fortunately, being is more critical here than doing.  One question looms above all, though.  What about my own need for an interested and caring ear?  A compassionate and caring confidante is handy.  Should such a person not be available, though, I can manage with the equilibrium I've worked toward over the years.  The more I live, the more I read,  and the more I reflect, the more I’ve come to wonder if  core emtional strength isn’t  a basic component of the human design, a parallel track DNA, part of the package we’re born with, there to be uncovered, nurtured and honed with use throughout our lives.  We’re ready, then, with a mature solidity, when it’s our turn to be the bulwark.   My inner strength, my steel core,  is roused and active, primed for its role in this phase of my life. 

"You will weep and know why," the late-Victorian British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says.   I wept, and I know why.  The segue in generational responsibility has occurred.  In his poem Margaret, Hopkins continues: 

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

 It is Margaret you mourn for.

The bulwark is our destiny.  It’s what we were born for, what’s been bequeathed to us.    Whether it’s a blight or not is up to us, I guess.  Still, a part of us will mourn "Margaret", our essential child self that passes along with our parents.