The Long Goodbye

On dementia, aging parents, and the grief we're too guilty to name

Rebecca Branham made candy at Christmas.

Peppermint patties, butterscotch haystacks, chocolate fudge, chocolate peanut butter balls…the kind of cooking that takes all day and leaves the kitchen smelling like butter and sugar and everything good. She’d set up at her kitchen table in Ridgeway, South Carolina, her hands moving through the same motions they’d been doing since before my own mom was little, and we’d all find our way in through her screened door eventually. Drawn by the smell, by the ritual, by her. Nanny Sis, we called her. Everyone did.

She was a seamstress for years, fingers precise and patient, and then she cooked in a school cafeteria, feeding other people’s children the way she fed everyone who sat on her porch swing or walked through her door. She was a devout church-going Southern woman who showed up early and stayed late and always brought something to share. She built community the way other people breathe…automatically, constantly, without making a fuss about it. When my grandfather was alive, that house in Ridgeway was the center of everything. She was the center of everything. Every Sunday, we gathered there.

And then my Papa Grady died in 2006, and we discovered what his generation had quietly done to the women they loved...everything was in his name. The house, the cars, the bank accounts, the utilities. My Nanny Sis had lived a full and devoted life inside that marriage and had absolutely nothing on paper to show she’d even existed in it. She had no credit; her name on none of the accounts. She had been so thoroughly taken care of that she had never been given the chance to take care of herself. This wasn't unusual for their generation. Until 1974, a married woman couldn't even open a line of credit without her husband's signature. The law had spent the better part of a century ensuring that women like my Nanny Sis simply didn't exist on paper, and most of them never knew to question it.

My parents spent months helping her untangle it all, helping her learn, at 75 years old, how to exist in the world on her own. And she did just that. She figured it out and kept going.

And then, slowly, she didn’t.

It started small in the slow way it does...keys lost in a parking lot, a trip to the grocery store where she forgot why she was there. Then came the sleepwalking, the waking up on the back porch in the dark with no memory of how she got there. Days passing without remembering her last shower. The ordinary mechanics of daily life started coming apart at the seams. We tried to make light of it at first, the way families do when something is too heavy to look at directly. I have a photo from Christmas 2016, the two of us making candy together, and I wrote “before this old timers sets in and hides all her recipes from us.” We said it with love…laughing was the only way through.

But eventually, even the laughing couldn’t heal.

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My parents did what all people do when they love someone, and the world hands them no good options. They moved her into their home, they hired a day nurse, and came home every evening after work to take over. My dad helped her out of bed each morning, patient and unhurried, and lowered her into her recliner like she was the most important thing in the room...because to him, she was. He made her a cup of coffee every single day while she waited for her nurse. My mom would dress her mom each morning, and would help her with the bathroom, the deeply intimate and unglamorous parts of caregiving that nobody wants to write about, and eventually, we all may face. They talked to her like she was fully present, because she deserved that, because love doesn’t stop showing up when it stops being recognized or remembered.

My mom and dad were in their late fifties at that time…still working full-time, still showing up for their grandkids, still the ones everyone called when something went wrong. And quietly, without complaint, they were doing all of this for my Nanny Sis as well. My sweet parents haven’t yet had the chance to exhale between chapters in life. They haven’t had a season of just being Sam and Myra without someone needing something from them. They haven’t traveled the way they’ve always wanted to. They haven’t yet had the empty nest they’ve more than earned. They went from raising us to being grandparents to now parenting their own parents, one generation flowing directly into the next with no break, no pause, no moment of just being free.

I watched all of this firsthand during the seven weeks we quarantined with my parents in the spring of 2020, all tucked into their house while the world outside came apart.

Even beyond the caretaking duties of my Nanny Sis, my dad would also drive across town almost every day to pick up his own mother and bring her to his house so she wouldn’t be alone during that terrifying and isolating time. He’d get her settled, drive her back home later, go back the next day, and do it again. Their relationship has never been simple or easy. She wasn’t always there when he needed her, left him to figure out a lot of things on his own when he was far too young to have to. And still, every day, without ceremony, without making her feel the weight of what she’d cost him, he showed up for her. To this day, he still shows up for her.

He gives her the kind of steady, patient care that she hadn’t always given him…not out of obligation and not to prove a point, but because that’s the man he became in spite of everything. Some people, when the time comes to parent their own parents, they choose to do it and show their parents what it should have looked like all along. A demonstration, not punishment…but to show that this is how it should’ve been done…this is who we could have been to each other.

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My generation is starting to live this right now. Those of us in our late thirties and forties are watching our parents get older, slower, and with more questionable ailments. They’re getting heartbreaking diagnoses, starting to need more than they’re willing to admit, and most are too stubborn to give the full picture out of protection to us…their children. We are watching the people who built our whole foundation start to need that very same foundation held up for them, but that need is met with the avoidant “oh, it’s nothing” or “it’s no big deal.” Our parents are still working, some are still taking care of their own parents’ declining health, and they shield the whole truth. We are their children, after all…they’ve been protecting us our whole lives.

And all the while, we are here raising our own kids, building or pivoting our careers, and still trying to figure out who we are. It’s now that we start fielding the “we need to talk” phone calls, the “I have news” FaceTimes, conversations about procedures, questionable scans, and what comes next.

Underneath all of that practical stuff is something softer and harder to admit...we find ourselves grieving. Not just our grandparents saying goodbye, but the harsh reality that our parents soon will, too. I can’t even bring myself to that place. My dad and I rarely talk on the phone, he’ll text me or send me Instagram memes…so when I see his name come across my phone, my heart stops for a moment…someone’s died or someone is going to. I have to take a breath before I answer. Most of the time, it ends up being nothing serious…but in the back of my head and now literally every time I talk to my parents or spend time with them, I’m plagued with the reality that as they get older, our time together is less certain.

Because there are still days, if I’m honest, when I need my mom or dad to just be my mom or dad. When something hard happens, I want to call them and have them be fully present and available the way they were when I was younger. And they try…they always try. But, they’re both so exhausted already…and stretched thin…and carrying more than any person should have to carry. Balancing their own long goodbyes with their parents at the same time that they start their own long goodbyes with us. I know that, and I love them for it, and I also grieve the version of my parents that had more left to give.

I think a lot of people my age are sitting with that same quiet grief and not saying it out loud because it sounds ungrateful, because we are adults and we should be past needing to be taken care of. But the truth is, you don’t really ever stop needing your parents to be your parents, and the moment you realize they are too consumed by their own hard seasons to fully show up for yours…there’s a specific kind of loneliness that feels ungrateful and selfish.

Our kids are becoming more independent at the same time our parents are becoming less so, and we are standing in the middle of that shift, trying to hold it all together without letting anyone see how much it hurts.

Nanny Sis is still with us, though more gone than present. She now lives in a good facility, one that’s committed to making her as comfortable as possible in her final days. My mom FaceTimes me sometimes so I can see her, and I watch her lying in her bed, looking up at the screen with an expression that splits me open every single time. She is reaching…I can see her trying, pulling at something just out of her grasp, working so hard to place a face or find a word or feel safe with the people on the other side of the glass.

I just tell her I love her, and I tell her she’s beautiful.

And she cries. She always tears up. I don’t even know if she knows why. I think possibly the body can still feel love even when the mind has already let it go. I have to believe that, because the alternative is too much to sit with. I know each tear that flows down her face is a memory of who she is and who we are. I just know it…even if she’ll never again find the words to say it.

I find myself wondering whether lying in that bed, unreachable behind her own forgetting, counts as life in the way we mean when we say that word. I don’t have an answer, and I don’t believe there is one. What I do know is that my grandpas were both taken too soon…there was so much left unsaid, so much unresolved…so much life left to live. And now, my parents both have the gift of the long goodbye with their mothers. Exhausting and almost too much to bear…yes, and…they have the chance to do it right, to do it better.

That love leaves a mark that memory simply can’t erase. Somewhere underneath all of it, my Nanny Sis still knows she is loved. And, isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what we all hope for? That at the end, whenever that may be, our parents would know that they are loved, they matter, and their lives were well lived.

My Nanny Sis is the one who taught me that a table is never just a table. You open your door, you make space, and you feed whoever shows up…not because they earned it or deserved it, but because they’re there, they need it…that’s enough of a reason. She taught me that a kitchen is where love gets made real, where you show people they matter…without words…but by the gift of a full plate in front of them. That is my inheritance, her legacy to me, and I carry it into every kitchen I’ve ever worked in.

And Sam and Myra...my mom and dad…they, too, are still teaching me something I’m learning in real time. They are showing me what it looks like to love someone all the way to the end, even when it may be exhausting and heartbreaking and thankless, and there’s no finish line in sight. To make the coffee every morning, to drive across town, to show up not because it’s easy or convenient or because anyone is keeping score, but because that is what love actually looks like…when it stops being a feeling and starts becoming a choice you make every single day.

That is the inheritance they are leaving me, right now, and I’m watching. I'm taking notes, and I'm trying to show them how loved they are, how much they matter, before it's too late.

And I’ll be honest... I worry about them. I watch my parents pour themselves out for everyone around them, for their grandkids, for my Nanny Sis, for my grandmother, for their siblings…for us, still, always for us…and all I want is to be able to pour back into them. I wonder and wait for when it’ll be my turn to show up for them the way they have shown up for everyone else…I wait for when they’ll be ready to let me.

If you’re reading this and you recognize your own parents in mine...call them. Not to ask for something, but just to ask how they are, and then actually wait for the answer. Show up in whatever small way you can before the showing up becomes urgent. Tell them what they’ve taught you while they can still hear it. Because the long goodbye starts earlier than any of us expect, and the things we wish we’d said have a way of outlasting the chance to say them.

My Nanny Sis may not remember any of it, but I will…I will remember all of it.