It’s been a rough couple of weeks at Chez Ross and that has caused me to ponder exactly how the snowflake Millennials and Gen Z types get through such harsher moments of life.
These two recent generations are easily offended and overly self-centered, convinced that the world exists for their amusement and when they are forced to confront unpleasant realities such as that they aren’t the best piano players, athletes or students, it too often causes them to curl up in the fetal position, thumb securely plunged into their mouth.
Often in recent days I’ve wondered how they would cope with what our family has had to face of late.
To begin, my mother was rushed to the hospital from her long-term care facility about three weeks back. At first it was suspected to be a stroke, with ongoing bleeding on the brain.
The ER doctor shepherded my brother and me into a side room for The Talk.
The Talk is an oft-used euphemism.
When young children want to know where babies come from, they get that version of The Talk.
When those kids have grown up and begin seeing members of the other sex (are we still allowed to break it down that simply?) they get an updated version of The Talk.
When one side of dating couple wants to move on, there is yet another variation of The Talk. Married couples deciding, as one former sports editor used to put it, to split the blankets as in divorce, have another example of The Talk.
The Talk from a doctor is a life-and-death chat, literally.
Our mother would go on to spend more than two weeks in the hospital ICU, during which time there would be an emotional roller coaster with more iterations of The Talk, now including my son. He’s a Millennial, but an outlier in terms of being emotionally tough and mature.
He also had power of attorney for my mother because in the pragmatic way my family thinks, we wanted to make sure we had someone who most likely would not predecease my mother.
My mother’s health problems from the past four or five years, predating her long-term care stay, and how she handled them, has reinforced in my mind her mental toughness.
She was born in 1936, amid the Great Depression to a family of modest economic circumstances. She raised my brother and I amid domestic discord. She survived several bouts of sepsis in recent years.
But this time, the accumulated problems were too much to overcome and so she passed away a week ago.
Fortunately, she had preplanned her funeral because people of her generation and her family, are big on formal funerals.
As is typically the case, I got to see relatives I had not seen in many years. There were stories exchanged, along with vows to stay in better touch, which are unlikely to be fulfilled.
The day of my mother’s funeral home visitation, my wife went to our basement to discover a backed-up sewer line.
This was a common problem on our street before all the government-mandated sewer updates, but never for us in about 35 years of living here.
It’s an even more common occurrence for those on the street and elsewhere since the sewer work has been performed. That’s what we call progress – at least for people who solve these government-created problems.
Of all the days, it had to be this day. But the good people at Roto Rooter had a person there within hours and my wife left the afternoon visitation to go home to allow him to handle the problem.
We were not about to collapse in a puddle of goo and commence thumb sucking.
The relatively new pastor at my mother’s church, a church she has been physically unable to visit for probably four or five years, was wonderful in performing the service the next day, both at the funeral home and the grave site.
I had emailed him some thoughts on my mother, including her generosity toward others. It was gratifying to hear from him that in talking with some church members, they had given him many specific examples backing up what I had told him.
The funeral home (Geisel) did an excellent job all around even though my three-year-old granddaughter provided an innocent moment of comic relief during the funeral service by saying “This is boring.”
For the most part, the people of the ICU were great.
I’ll end this with an anecdote relayed by my brother.
He was waiting in the lobby of his apartment building for me to pick up him and a friend when the friend went upstairs to allow a delivery man to put a package in that friend’s apartment.
The building manager came up and asked my brother if he was going somewhere.
“To my mom’s funeral,” my brother said.
“Great. Congratulations,” or words to that effect, said the manager.
My brother was puzzled at best.
“I’m going to my mom’s funeral,” he repeated.
As the manager stumbled through his explanation, it seems he somehow had misheard that it was a marriage.
My brother brushed it off and even suggested to me it might make an amusing note in the blog.
I can only imagine how this bit of unintentionally offensive conversation might have triggered a Millennial or Gen Z softy.
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