Lost in Translation
A Thanksgiving meditation on the generation gap.
by Kevin Keck
November 26, 2008
Shortly before I met the woman who would become my wife, I spent about a year helping to take care of my grandmother who was in the thick of Alzheimer's. She was eight-five at the time, wheelchair bound, but quite chatty. It was disturbing enough to have to help her to the bathroom — after all, I am not a trained nurse, nor did I have children at the time, so my experience with bowels other than my own was confined to maintaining litter boxes. But bathrooms have a way of introducing comedy into any situation, so that was ultimately a small burden for me to shoulder.
What was most troubling were the hours I accumulated talking to my grandmother, trying to get her to remember me, to remember how she met my grandfather and how they had eloped — a charming story really: they went to a movie, left halfway through and went to the justice of the peace, were married, and then went back to the movie in case anyone asked them how it ended. But none of that was there. She would smile and ask about people that died before I was born.
Thinking of all this, I am filled with remorse — a beautiful word that comes from old French which literally means to be bitten again. And I am bitten continually. When I see my parents with my children, I feel trapped as a thought between two languages, with no adequate word in either tongue to express what I am feeling. So many things about my father that I found confusing while growing up have finally been deciphered with the Rosetta Stones that are my children. But my dad isn't speaking the paranoid, worrisome language of early fatherhood anymore — he's lost in the lexicon of being a grandparent, for which the rules of authority allow him a playfulness that he never fully expressed with me and my brother.
I am bitten whenever I am seized with the compulsion to tell any of my children how much I love them. My son, who is nearly seven, seems embarrassed for me.
My children will never understand the deep love I have for them — at least not until they have children of their own.
My twin girls, who are two, smile and nod their heads. I suppose these moments sink their teeth in the most because my grandmother developed a curious habit the further she sank into dementia. Whenever anyone walked into a room where she was, she would ask that person, "Do you love me?" It was rather jarring, no matter how often she asked me, because in that moment she seemed strangely alert and focused, which was not at all her normal state of being. As soon as her questioned was answered, she slipped away again into a dreamy gaze.
Once, when I was sitting next to her and helping her eat, she turned and looked at me and and asked me if I loved her. "Of course I love you," I said. "You always took care of me." She smiled and then leaned her head on my shoulder and left it there for nearly half a minute. When she lifted her head she said, "Dewey, when is papa going to get back from the store?"
I remember this as I am leaving my in-laws', Isabella stuffed with turkey and mashed potatoes, her eyes heavy and her head on my shoulder. This is where the bliss of being a parent weighs in equal measure against the sorrow of it all: My children will never understand the deep love I have for them — at least not until they have children of their own, and at that moment I will begin seeing the world differently too, as a grandparent. We are never quite able to speak the same language.
But a head on the shoulder — what's lost in words is made plain when translated literally by the heart.
©2008 Kevin Keck and Babble
About the Author
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Kevin Keck is the author of the memoir Are You There God? It's Me. Kevin., and a collection of personal essays, Oedipus Wrecked. Visit him at www.thekeck.com.
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