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Boomer "Orphan"

I study my face in the mirror. The asymmetry getting more pronounced around the mouth, little cracks fanning from the outer corners of my eyes; I can no longer pass for a young woman. You not would look at me and use the "o" word: Those of us who lose our parents later in life know we’re not orphans in the narrow sense; not waifs at the mercy of fate and chance. The culture has little sympathy. There’s a reason Dickens’ fame wasn't built on 50-year orphans with Nespresso machines on their counters.

Still, even if the culture expects that I man up and get on with it, an insistent undertow exerts its hollowing force. The day my mother died, I was no longer anyone’s child. The barrier that had stood between me and the grave collapsed. The iron truth that one can die in grief and pain regardless of how fortunate she'd been in life told me everything about the limits of personal agency, of human control.

Loss of History

I also realized the abrupt disappearance of big chunks of my history.

My mother was the last living person who truly knew me as a child, the only one who remembered that I was difficult and colicky; that I was sociable and musical, bouncing in my crib to “Party Doll” and wailing along to “Oh My Papa;” that I loved playing with the dog and hated being thwarted, planting myself at my parents’ bedroom door and screaming until they opened it at 2 in the morning when I wanted to play, which apparently was a regular occurrence until I was taken to a psychiatrist who told my mother it was she who needed therapy which put a quick end to that adventure.

My mother was the one who recalled how attached we were, how I’d dig my head into her neck as she held me and that “we just loved each other.”

What I Forgot to Ask

And then there are all those things I forgot to ask, from the easy ones--What was Afghanistan like the year your spent your birthday in Kabul? Why did Aunt Birdie never marry? What made Uncle Georgie feel like a failure all his life? —to the more emotionally challenging--What were you actually thinking that time you slapped me when I failed that audition at 22? Why did it seem I was at fault? What precipitated that fist fight you had with Dad when we were under 5? Why was religion so abhorrent to you? When was your marriage to Dad strongest? How were you able to stay in love so long?

Once more "Never, never, never, never, never" silently rings.