Watching Your Parents Grow Old: A Loneliness With No Name

A photograph is a clock that only ticks when you compare it to the present. I found one last week, tucked inside a book my mother lent me, a picture from somebody's wedding in 1998. My father is wearing a suit that fits him properly. His shoulders fill it. His hair is black and thick and parted the way men of his generation part their hair, with intention, with oil, with the quiet vanity of someone who believes he will look this way for a long time. My mother is next to him in a green sari, laughing at something outside the frame, her face unlined, her posture straight, her hands unburdened by the tremor that now makes her teacup rattle faintly against its saucer every morning at seven.

I held the photograph for a long time. Longer than a photograph deserves, probably. I held it because the two people in it are the same two people downstairs right now, watching the evening news with the volume too high because my father's hearing has narrowed to the frequencies that exclude my mother's voice, which means she repeats herself, which means he says "haan haan" without having heard, which means she stops trying, which means the house is quieter than it used to be, not because anyone chose quiet but because the infrastructure of communication between them has eroded in the specific, unglamorous way that bodies erode when they have been in service for sixty-seven years.

I noticed it during Diwali. I notice it every Diwali, actually, but this Diwali I noticed it noticing. My father lit the diyas the way he has lit them for forty years, but this year his hands shook, and the match took three strikes, and he held the flame to the wick with a concentration that used to be unnecessary, and I stood behind him watching and feeling something I have no adequate word for. Not sadness. Not fear. Something older than both, something that lives in the part of a child that never stops being a child regardless of age, the part that needs its parents to be permanent fixtures of the world, immovable, undiminished, the way they were in the photograph, the way they were in 1998, the way they will never be again.

I watched my mother climb the stairs last month. I watched her the way you watch something you are memorising. She held the railing with her right hand, the hand with the tremor, and she paused on the landing, and the pause was new. The pause did not exist six months ago. The pause is a sentence in a language I am learning to read against my will, a language in which every new symptom is a word and every word means the same thing and the thing it means is a direction, not a destination, a slope, not a cliff, but a slope, steady, measurable if I were cruel enough to measure it, which I am not, but which my eyes measure anyway, involuntarily, every time I visit.

I want to talk about this. I want to say it to someone. I want to sit in a room and say "my father's hands shake now and I am not ready" and have the sentence received without someone trying to comfort me out of it. My mother would be hurt. My sister would cry and then we would both have to manage the crying and the original feeling would get buried under the management of it. My friends, the ones whose parents are still in the photograph years, would listen kindly and understand nothing. My friends whose parents have already crossed some further threshold would understand too much and the conversation would become about their grief rather than mine.

There is no place for this. No cultural container, no ritual, no greeting card, no appropriate moment at a family dinner to say "I am watching you disappear in increments and each increment takes something from me that I will not get back." We have funerals for after. We have nothing for during. The during is where I live now, in the long, unnarrated middle between the photograph and whatever comes after the photograph, and the middle is lonely in a way I did not expect because I am surrounded by the very people I am losing and I cannot tell them I am losing them because telling them would be an act of cruelty disguised as honesty and I love them too much for that.

So I carry it. The photograph. The pause on the landing. The match that takes three strikes. The teacup that rattles. I carry all of it, and the carrying is heavy, and the heaviness has no audience, and some nights, after I have said goodnight and closed their door and walked to my room, I sit on the edge of my bed and feel the full weight of a grief that has no death to justify it and no end to define it, and I am alone with it, completely.