What We Carry Forward

At the funeral of my wife’s friend’s 99-year-old mother, I watched a daughter say goodbye to the woman who had shaped her entire life. She was an only child, and the love she had shown her mother over the years was evident not only in what was said at the service, but in the way she had cared for her and shared her life with her. Sitting there, I found myself thinking about parenting from the other end of life. What remains between a parent and child after the years of raising, teaching, worrying and guiding have passed?

We spend so much of our early years as parents thinking about what our children need from us and what we hope for them. Then the years pass. Our children grow older, we grow older, and our relationship with them continues to unfold. I found myself wondering whether a parent ever stops worrying, hoping, praying or wanting the best for a child, no matter how old either of them becomes.

Like most parents, we raised our children hoping they would find their way and build lives that were meaningful to them. But adulthood does not arrive according to a common timetable, nor does life unfold exactly as parents or children imagine it will. Our children have their own stories to live, just as we had ours. I am still learning what parenting looks like when our children are adults—when to speak, when to listen, when to help, and when simply to trust them with their own lives.

Sitting in the church also made me wonder about our own parents. How often did they worry about us without our knowing it? How many of our decisions did they question but allow us to make anyway? And as they grew older, what did they think when they looked back on their years of parenting? Did they remember what went well, or did their minds sometimes return to things they wished they had done differently? I suspect most parents carry some of both. Perhaps one of the ironies of parenting is that by the time we begin to understand some of what our parents experienced with us, we are experiencing it with our own children.

I thought, too, about Deuteronomy 6 and how ordinary the teaching from one generation to another sounds: sitting at home, walking along the road, lying down and getting up. I wonder how much of what our children eventually carry from us comes not from what we deliberately tried to teach, but simply from what they experienced by living alongside us.

As the service ended, we made our way into the church lobby, and I began to hear music. When we stepped outside, there near the entrance was a saxophonist playing as people came down the steps. It was beautiful and unexpected, and after everything we had just heard and felt inside the church, I found myself slowing down to listen. After 99 years of life, I could not help thinking about her mother now joyfully with God and His angels.

Later, we sat around a lunch table with longtime friends. We caught up on one another’s lives, talked about our children, passed phones around to share pictures, remembered stories and laughed. No one had planned a conversation about parenting. It simply happened, the way these conversations do among friends who have known one another for years. At some point it occurred to me that we were still talking about our children as naturally as we had when they were young. The pictures were now on phones instead of tucked into wallets, but the instinct to share them was much the same.

As I listened to everyone around the table, I began thinking about the friendships themselves. What had made us friends in the first place? Why, after all these years and all the changes in our lives, could we still sit around a table and laugh so easily? We had watched children grow, parents age, careers change and life take turns none of us could have predicted when we first met. Our children had grown up while, apparently, so had we. Yet something about being together still felt familiar. These were people who remembered parts of our lives because they had been there for them. Sitting there, laughing and remembering, I found myself thinking about why God gave us friendship and how different the journey would have been without friends with whom to share it.

We had gathered because a daughter was saying goodbye to her mother after 99 years. Later, we were sitting with friends talking about our own children and where life had taken all of us. Somewhere between those moments, we walked out of the church and heard that saxophone. Much of parenting is spent looking forward. We wonder what our children will become, where they will go and whether they will be all right. Then, somewhere along the way, we begin looking backward too. We think about our own parents differently. We remember things they did that we understand better now, and we may even recognize some of their worries in ourselves.

I do not know that yesterday answered any of the questions I found myself asking, and perhaps I did not expect it to. I am still thinking about the daughter who said goodbye to her mother after 99 years, our own children and parents, and those old friends sitting around a table laughing and sharing pictures. I am still thinking about hearing that saxophone from the lobby and then stepping outside and seeing the musician playing as people left the church. It was one day, made up of moments that would have been easy to let pass without thinking much about them. Instead, they made me think about how quickly the years move, the people God places in our lives along the way, and how much there is to be grateful for while we still have one another.