Today marks five years since Kevin died. I still often live in a state of disbelief that it has been so long since I last saw Kevin, last spoke to him, last said goodnight or good morning, or all the other million little things that make up the day of two people who live together and love each other.  I am still surprised at how time can simultaneously seem to rush forward and stand still. It has been forever and it has been no time at all.

We have moved on, mostly by putting one foot in front of the other and trying our best to live in a way that would make Kevin proud. I think there are more smiles and laughter these days though the most fun times still invoke the realization that Kevin is missing. That feeling will never leave my life, nor do I want it to. And indeed he has missed so much, especially this past year with my daughter’s high school graduation and delivery to college.

It is this added grief that has marked these past 365 days as different, indeed harder. This year has brought together the grief borne of both loss and of letting go. They are two different kinds of grief, but they have equal weight in my heart. I know I must let go of my children, and believe that Kevin and I did the best we could to raise them to be strong, thoughtful, caring, creative people. I see so much of their father in their appearance, their actions, their mannerisms, and their thought processes. I am grateful that his presence lives on in them so brightly. But to say it is easy to watch my children fly away would be a complete lie. If I could have them back in the house living with me, I would do it in a minute! What is this cruel job of parenting that our work is to shower all the love and patience we have upon our children in order to make them capable of living without us?

I have thought a lot lately about the so-called “sandwich generation” of which I was very much a part. It seems about ten years ago much was written about us—those people who, through coincidences of birth, marriage, and childbearing timing, were caring for both elderly parents and young children. I was firmly in that sandwich. Born to older parents (mom was 38 and dad was 43 when I came along), and delaying childbirth myself until I was 29, I spent several years caring for loved ones on both ends of the age spectrum. I remember having a conversation with Richard Russo, one of my very favorite authors. He was planning a trip to Ann Arbor for a book signing and I was involved in the planning. He explained that his schedule was iffy because of this very thing—an 85-year-old mother and a 19-year-old daughter, both of whom needed him. I mentioned an epiphany I had recently had: that a big part of the problem with both of these groups is that they each wish for more freedom than is good for them: young people because they aren’t mature enough to handle it, older people because it is physically risky. Yet as caregivers, it was our responsibility to keep them safe, to say no to dangerous desires.  At the time I had both a 16-year-old and an 88-year-old arguing with me about how often and how far they could drive. It was a challenging time to maneuver through sanely.

Now, my parents are both gone, and I have taken my youngest to college. Of course, I have had the added loss of my husband during that time, which makes this even harder. So often in the past five years, I have made decisions on my own, wondering if it was the right choice, if it is what Kevin would have done. I constantly question whether I’ve helped my kids through their time of grief, if I showed them my own grief and vulnerability often enough. I grapple with balance, with encouraging them to be on their own all the while fearing their leaving. Simultaneously, I try to shrug off the feeling of being an “adult orphan” though many times that’s how I feel. I wish for my parents’ advice and counsel, for them to be here guiding me in my own parenting, and sharing in the accomplishments of their grandchildren, whom they cherished beyond measure.

So I wonder, what becomes of us sandwich generation folks once the "bread" has been removed? We are dealing with two different kinds of grief, but it is grief nonetheless. One form of bereavement brings pain, loss, anger, sadness. The other is differently colored, with pride, hope, and the ability to smile through the tears. I was completely unprepared for the first, but had my children’s entire lifetime to prepare for the latter. 

Preparation doesn’t make it any easier I am finding. Loss, whether through death or letting go, is painful and heart-wrenching, it just is. My heart swells with satisfaction and delight at the sight of my son and daughter strolling across their respective college campuses, working at their part-time jobs, or handling difficult situations on their own. In the past few weeks alone they’ve signed leases, closed and opened bank accounts, settled in with perfect strangers, and dealt so maturely with a broken heart. All the matters of adult life for which I hope I have prepared them but which I must admit, I’d rather still be doing for them. 

Rarely do we truly realize how important it is to be needed in the midst of the needing time. When we’re deep in it, it feels like muck that holds us back, that weighs us down, that won’t let us have a moment’s rest; like quicksand that leaves you gasping for breaths and flailing to keep some of your own identity and autonomy. Yet, sit long enough on dry land without that needing, and one realizes quickly how painful it is to feel parched and arid, how much the needing, while taking your autonomy, was also giving you purpose and identity and life. 

Kevin loved his children so much, and worked so hard to be the kind of parent he hoped to be. In the end, he also fought so hard to stay here with them. On the fifth anniversary of Kevin’s passing, I honor his memory by tearfully and begrudgingly celebrating the independence of our children.

I remember the second or maybe third time I went out with Kevin. We ended up at his apartment, with a bag of Fritos and a six-pack of Stroh’s Signature beer. We had both attended college classes that day, then worked an eight-hour shift at the Hyatt hotel. It was closing in on midnight and I had a class the next day at 8 a.m.

We started talking about stuff that made me think this wasn’t going to be a short-term relationship—how impossible it was to get along with our parents, plans for the future, how we would raise kids, whether we believed in God, what we wanted to be doing when we turned thirty. I remember telling him that my biggest goal was to live life with few regrets. “They’ll eat you alive,” I think I said, trying to seem deep and introspective.

I’m not sure how well I’ve done at living the kind of life my twenty-year-old-self wanted me to live. Regrets are tricky, sly creatures that sneak up on you when you think you’re doing fine. I have my share of the usual regrets—not keeping in better touch with friends, not learning earlier how to budget and save, not getting back to grad school earlier, wishing I spoke better French. When it comes to our marriage, I find regrets to be moving targets. I regret some choices or situations when I’m grieving, but those same things seem less worrisome when I think rationally. There are times when I regret renovating our house. It was a significant accomplishment. But, in the end, we should have spent the time and money sucked up by our house projects on family travel. Perhaps, I sometimes think, we should have waited a while to marry, taking the time to better establish ourselves in our individual pursuits. It could have made me better prepared for the life I’m now living. 

But these are regrets as viewed through the rearview mirror, borne of tragedy, and with hindsight as my guide. They are the kinds of regrets about which I can only say there’s nothing to be done about that now.  

I’ve considered the impossible-to-change regrets lately as I read Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal. My reading of the book was followed by a lively discussion at my local bookstore. Being Mortal is Gawande’s look at our inability to understand and properly care for the dying, be they elderly or terminally ill. The medical community has a natural conflict, with their first priority of keeping someone alive when, perhaps that is not what’s really best. In the chapters on terminal illness, Gawande points out instances where the decision to avoid attempts at prolonging life actually led to better quality of life for the time remaining. I can only say that it is easy to proclaim with a healthy voice, the desire to “end it” if you ever were to find yourself extremely debilitated by disease, but more difficult to do so in the midst of that situation.

Kevin and I talked many times about how we both would never want to be kept alive on ventilators or feeding tubes. As the Terry Schiavo tragedy unfolded we both made sure the other understood this. But once we found ourselves in the midst of our own tragedy, it wasn’t so easy. After two spinal cord surgeries, the second of which was mishandled and led to formation of a hematoma that nearly killed him, Kevin was left a quadriplegic. Rather than say it’s time to stop, he instead implored me to keep fighting with him, his only real request of me during that time was that I never give up on him.

So I didn’t. 

My regrets don’t have to do with prolonging Kevin’s life. I am grateful for every second he was here. But the choice to continue fighting meant that we were in battle mode every second. It meant that, when hospice told me he only had a few days, I couldn’t go to him and tell him that we needed to say our “I love you’s” and “goodbyes.” It meant we marched on, side-by-side, rather than face-to-face, toward an inevitability that neither of us could accept by putting words to it. We continued battling disease until one of his tumors ruptured and he was gone within minutes. 

I do regret that we didn’t have some quiet minutes between us; that our choice to keep going prevented us from a peaceful end.

Being involved in grief and widows groups, I have learned a few things. I have talked with widows whose spouses died suddenly from accidents or heart attacks, and those who, like Kevin, suffered for years with heart disease, cancer, or Parkinson’s. Rarely in my conversations have I found someone who didn’t have regrets about the way things ended. I hear lamentations like, “I knew he wasn’t coming back to me, so I said it was ok to turn off the ventilator. Now I wonder why I did that. I feel like I killed him.” Or, “I told him it was ok to let go, so he did. He slipped away. It was peaceful, but now I hate myself. Why did I tell him it was ok and not to keep fighting?”

I suppose what I’ve learned most of all is that is that there seldom is a truly peaceful end, one that is not fraught with sadness and grief and tinged with flecks of emotions like guilt and regret that color the situation impossible. I think, too, sometimes we all look for regrets, or at least for things we feel we should have done better or differently. It is perhaps, all tied up in wanting, more than anything, for the outcome to have been otherwise.

I’ve also reconciled (the opposite of regret?) myself to the knowledge that Kevin died the way he needed to: fighting; trying to keep disease, despair, fear, and death, at bay for just another day. He needed that. Had I said anything to him to signal my acceptance of the end, well, I can’t even begin to think of the terror it would have caused in him. I know I would also regret having done that, so how to resolve? It just isn’t possible. I suppose letting him battle on was my small gift to him, bequeathed unknowingly, that I now must live with.

So while it might have been good for some of the patients in Being Mortal to accept the end, we need to understand that this was their choice. As admirable as it is, it isn’t everyone’s. It certainly wasn’t Kevin’s.