Breath(e)

This is the first day of my blog.

I'm calling it The Older Orphan because that's who I am. My mother died on 3 May, 2010, just five weeks ago, and my father died in December 1998. I'm 51 years old. And now I'm an orphan.

Orphan. That word always felt so Dickensian: a small, grimy-nosed boy in a torn and tattered waistcoat pleading for another ladle of watery gruel. But now it describes me and hundreds of thousands -- millions? -- of people just like me. We're losing our parents and we're standing alone, no one watching our every move, no one cheering or criticizing or laughing or wincing at our foibles and our achievements.

My mother had Alzheimer's. So it's probably accurate to say that I actually lost her a number of years ago. I thought I'd feel a huge surge of relief as soon as she died. And I did. Of course. Who would want anyone to suffer those indignities, year after year? So, yes, I am relieved. And I am also incredibly sad. I thought the relief would outweigh the grief. Not the case. The grief is the more powerful of the two emotions.

What I grieve is my loss. What I grieve is the passing of time. It -- life -- is whizzing by, sometimes unnoticed and rarely feeling like it's being squeezed for every drop it's worth. I spend a lot of time thinking about the past. I spend too much time fantasizing about the future: the relationship I'll finally have, the retirement I'll be able to afford, the jeans I'll finally squeeze back into. The present is sacrificed to rewriting history or scripting what's next.

I am determined to change.

The weekend before my mother died, I watched her as she breathed. She was being administered morphine and Atavan; she was alive but no longer reachable. I imagined my mother hovering somewhere between this world and the next. I watched that breath. It was shallow. Just one breath, then another. Then a pause. And then another breath. And as long as that breath came, my mother was alive. Life is in that single breath. We don't know if another is coming. But in that moment, there is breath and so there is life.

It was such a humbling realization because I'd never before allowed myself to distill it -- life -- down to such small proportions. Before that weekend of my mother's death, life was big and complicated, with plans and chaos and concessions and priorities. And then suddenly it became clear. That the only thing we can really experience is the single moment of time in which we are living. Right now. Breathe.

Making my life smaller but more intense. That's what I'm thinking about.

I have no idea what I'm going to write about. But I've told myself that I am going to write every day and I'm going to tell the truth, no matter how trivial or mundane or embarrassing.

My goal is to make this blog an authentic ride through my life. Maybe, if my fantasies come true, fellow orphans will speak out and share their stories and talk about how hard it is to finally stand on your own two feet and do the hard work of being in your life. Maybe other people from our generation will join the conversation and say, Shit, I'm really scared that my mother or my father is going to die. Or, Shit, I'm really scared that I'M going to die.

And then we come together and remind ourselves to live it in this one moment. And breathe.