Aging Well

Savoring the first family visit in over a year

With over half of North Carolina's population over the age of 65 now vaccinated, some families are planning their first get-togethers in over a year.

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Mom watching sunrise
By
Liisa Ogburn

It had been over one year since I had last had a proper visit with my parents. Multiple birthdays, Thanksgiving, the extended family reunion at Christmas, and simple get-togethers to mark no occasion at all—all these had been replaced by phone calls, FaceTime, texts and Zoom for over 365 days. While we spoke more frequently on the longer dog walks I now had the time to do, I couldn’t help but feel somehow untethered, free-floating—without the in-person visits with family, while also aware I was one of the lucky ones in her fifties with both parents still alive and well.

When finally, Mom and Dad had received both doses as part of Group 2, and I, too, through work, had received mine, they arranged an in-person visit on a windy beach in Georgia this past week.

Perhaps there is some overlap with how someone getting out of jail feels or finishing chemo and finally able to taste food again. There was certainly an echo of how I felt many, many years ago, flying home after over a year abroad in my early twenties. Expectant. Appreciative. I cried when the airplane wheels finally touched down at Douglas Airport.

There is a Japanese word “yutori,” which means “spaciousness.” In a 2016 interview with Krista Tippett, poet Naomi Shihab Nye recounted being taught this word by a student in Japan who explained it as ‘arriving at a destination in time to look around, not be hurried, to feel and taste an experience.’

This pandemic year has necessitated a long, halted waiting, introducing a deprivation (many kinds of deprivation) and forcing an almost foreign feeling of spaciousness—at least it feels that way for me in my American life usually packed to the brim with work, three teenagers, church, volunteering, friends, and neighbors. While I can’t think of an equivalent word in English, in my work with those who are aging, I often see a similar spaciousness that seems to happen as one nears the end of life, reflecting back on one’s life.

Maybe this year, in the absence of being able to see who we want to see when we want to see them or do what we want to do when we want to do it, this concept of spaciousness has inhabited more of our lives?

Now at the age of 54, through school and work, I have had the great privilege of living in half a dozen different countries over the last thirty years (Japan, Finland, Costa Rica, Estonia, Germany, the US), but as vaccinations promise a reopening after a yearlong necessary quarantine, I do not feel a tug to visit any far-flung place right now. Quite the opposite, what I want is the simple act of sitting around a common table with people I love, without worry that if I remove my mask to eat or talk or laugh, I will unknowingly infect someone at the table with a disease that could kill or disable them.

And finally, I can say, that that is what I did this past week. I walked and biked and ate and sat around and talked and read beside my parents. Things that may have annoyed any of us about each other in past visits were acknowledged, if at all, with humor. (What family doesn’t have those things?) But mostly, I can honestly say, I savored each moment.

As I was packing up to leave, my mom kept returning to the living room window to take photos of the sun as it rose and painted the sky, like a turning kaleidoscope, a million changing colors.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Maybe just one more picture.”

We all savored each moment.

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