The Santa Claus effect

My parents and I aren’t the best at talking to each other.

I love them. They are hard-working and driven and fun and goofy and supportive and generous, in different times and in different measures. We fight sometimes, especially my dad and me, but never anything serious or lasting.

I’ve always seen the good and the bad in them, even as a child. I’ve always known my dad was overworked and overtired and took his stress out on us with his bad moods, constantly on the verge of shouting. I’ve also always known that when we visit a bookstore, it takes next-to-convincing on my part for him to offer to buy me the stack of books I show up carrying two hours later after I dive in full-throttle to browse my favorite sections. I’ve gotten frustrated with my mom for never fully grasping what I do in theatre even when I’ve explained it to her a hundred times, but I also know she supports me anyway, as she came to see every production I worked on, even when she didn’t really understand what I’d done for it.

But we don’t talk about our feelings. I didn’t tell my mom when my friends subtly edged me out of their group in sixth grade, and my dad didn’t get to tease me about crushes I never told him I had. I have trouble picking out Hallmark cards for holidays because even someone else’s words feel too cheesy and syrupy for us. Now, every once in a blue moon, my mom sends me a Facebook message with a cute saying about how much her daughter means to her. I appreciate the gesture, and I know she means every word, but for some reason it puts me on edge.

I like it better when she sends me videos of hedgehogs.

We’ve discussed it occasionally. How impressed I was when I realized how open and communicative my sister is, when the rest of us tend to keep things pretty tight to ourselves. How my mom wishes I shared more with her, but how I don’t really know how to when for so many years she didn’t ask me about what was troubling me – not because she didn’t care or notice, I know now, but because she didn’t know how to and hoped I’d talk about it myself. Instead, in most cases we learned to show our feelings and our moods through our actions, and that was plenty for me.

All of which is to say that the idea of talking to my parents about their deaths is not only uncomfortable and upsetting, but downright terrifying verging on impossible.

I have a pretty specific idea of what it would mean for me to die, or (perhaps bizarrely) even to lose my closest friends. But while my parents’ deaths are theoretically more imminent, assuming we all die of old age (or age-related illness), the idea of their steady presence being gone is unthinkable.

I don’t know what they want. I don’t know if they’d sign a DNR in the hospital, if they’d want to be in nursing homes or cared for at home, if they want to buried or cremated. I could take a pretty solid guess, because I’ve known them my whole life. But I’ve never asked.

It’s like how we all continue to say our Christmas gifts come from Santa Claus, so I can maintain the magic of Christmas and feel like a child again… If I don’t talk to my parents about dying, they never will.

Of course this is absurd and untrue and I know rationally that I should know the answers to the death questions, that they deserve that my siblings and I have the knowledge to take care of them as they would want.

But Naomi’s the oldest, and she’s always been more open to tough conversations. Can’t she just ask all the questions?

Observation: I’m having trouble getting my thoughts organized enough to write this, much more so than usual. I keep feeling like I’m pulled in a lot of different directions, like there’s so much to say or explain and no way to say it. After writing the last sentence above, I feel like the “right thing to do” is realize that letting someone else take responsibility is childish and immature. But at the same time, I actually think it’s very practical – my sister is more family-oriented and much older (fourteen years) and wiser to the ways of the world than I am. If anything were to happen to our parents, even though I live the closest, she’d probably be the one to organize everything that had to be done. Or at least, she would know what had to be done, and she would tell me what I need to know to make it happen logistically.

In most areas of my life, I work hard to be a “real adult,” to convince other people (and more importantly, myself) that I know what I’m doing and I can handle everything.

But if you ask me to have an adult conversation with my parents about their deaths, I might just throw a temper tantrum.

We’ve always been “actions speak louder than words” type people.

That’s okay, right? Right?