A Second Adolescence

Dearest Rachel –

It’s been long said that senility and dementia result in something that is referred to as a ‘second childhood’. You no longer know the things you used to know, so you’re about as ignorant and helpless as you were as a little child. You remember how this was, especially with your mom’s decline. It was what made her passing somewhat bearable, in that you had more or less lost her years before, as her mind slowly decayed and dissolved, and it was a blessing for her to be done with that (to say nothing of the fact that this childlikeness may have allowed her to come back to faith, at Twofeathers’ urgings).

Now, I’m not facing any of that by any stretch of the imagination; indeed, I haven’t seen any of that even happening with my parents yet. But at the same time, I do sense that, since your own passing, I’ve been forced into something of a second childhood of my own. Granted, it hasn’t been marked with any measure of helplessness or intellectual decline (that I know of – there’s always the Dunning-Kruger effect that I might be dealing with, where I think more highly of my abilities than I ought to), but in more ways than I’d like to believe, I’m very much back where I was during my later school days. Call it a second adolescence, if you will.

Consider the fact that I spend a fair amount of time at my parents’ home. To be sure, that setup was established shortly after retiring from my actual job (to this day, while I recognize that it is what I studied to do for a living, I refuse to refer to it as a ‘career’), and as much to keep an eye on them after Dad’s illness as it was for me to focus on my own ‘work’, rather than regularly being distracted by the many diversions of just hanging around at the house with you and Daniel throughout the entirety of the day. But there have been times when the situation has been turned on its head, and rather than me being there to help them out when they have need for me (although that still happens frequently enough, don’t get me wrong), they have resumed their parental roles as I struggle with life after you; talking, offering advice, and similar things.

As a result, this life after you feels eerily similar to life before you. My ‘office’ setup is essentially where I used to play my old Atari games once my homework was done back in junior high and early high school (which may explain why I was never the procrastinator you were, as they were always insistent that I complete my work before I was allowed to do so, but once I was, as long as I didn’t miss mealtimes, I had rather carte blanche as to how long I could spend). Their own computer setup – which they rarely use these days, since they have individual iPads they carry around with them upstairs – is mere feet from where I sit, and where I learned my way around my secondhand Apple IIe. And then there are Thursday nights, when we have dinner together with them; Mom looks forward to the opportunity to keep up her cooking skills, as she seems to fear they might atrophy if she falls out of practice (and with Dad unable to eat, and most recipes geared toward families or other groups, this is her one chance a week to do so).

It’s strange to admit about that last bit in particular that it would not have happened were you still here. After all, it has been said from time immemorial that I am to leave my parents behind, and cling to you, in order for us to become the independent family we were meant to be. But with you gone, everything slides back to a state, not quite of status quo ante, as things have changed in those intervening thirty years, but one that seems hauntingly familiar. There’s comfort in it, yes, but a slight uneasiness as well. There’s an underlying sense of ‘this should not be’ (probably due to the universally-held belief that it’s not right for a parent to have to bury their child; while you weren’t their child, you were of course part of the family, and the wrongness comes largely from the generational difference, after all. Your life is supposed to be as long as theirs, long enough to outlive them), compounded by the unspoken understanding that ‘this won’t last much longer,’ as my folks are, after all, showing their age. They still haven’t attained that of your parents, and I suppose there’s a touch of magical thinking in my mind that tells me I needn’t really worry until then, but that time isn’t all that far away, in the overall sweep of things. At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to assume yet another level of adult responsibility for, one that I can’t say I’m ready for yet. At least, not on my own.

And that’s the other part of this phase of my life that feels like I’m back in my school days; the search for a more permanent companion. Dating has changed since our high school and college days – which you would think is counterintuitive, as most of the activities associated with the process (apart from the stay-at-home, ‘Netflix-and-chill’ type model – and I never have been able to grasp how the root word of ‘to chill out’ suddenly became a euphemism for sex that way, but I digress) seem unchanged in their basic elements: a meal, a form of entertainment, a little travel, followed by the awkward attempts to agree on how far to take the relationship with each successive meeting. Or, maybe it hasn’t as much as I think, since the newfangled methods of meeting people have let me down fairly conclusively.

So, I’m about to do something that again reminds me of my days in college, and join up with a group at a different, larger church – much like I did at college when I joined up with B.A.S.I.C., as opposed to InterVarsity – in the hopes of meeting other people, Christian people, that I can hang around with (when I’m not dealing with other commitments within my current community, of course), and maybe, just maybe, find Megumi there. The plan definitely has some ‘reinventing myself’ vibes to it, much like I experienced back in college, so we’ll see where (and if – let’s be realistic, here) it takes me.

With that being said, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.