I am reminded. I am reminded each day as I walk the side street nearby, past the upscale assisted living facility. It is often dinner hour when I pass by. When my daughter was a baby, we called it the arsenic hour. Business-attired women my age drive up along the sidewalk and park their Hondas, Fords and mini-vans, get out and scramble for items in their trunks, piling them into their arms and then scurry off to their parent(s) in a click-clack of high-heeled pumps. Often they seem harried, scattered, seemingly holding their breath. I see other dutiful daughters driving up to the stop sign of that same street as I round that same corner. At other times, I see them in my rear view mirror. Well-coiffed women, hands on the steering wheel of a luxury SUV. They are grandmothers. Smiles stretch across their faces. Think positive! They seem to be telling themselves. I can see the love deep in their hearts, but also the stress and a douse of fear and deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes. Beside them are wrinkled-fleshed; white, perm-haired; bespeckled great grandmothers barely peering above the dashboard.

Last week, at the conclusion of a meeting with a disAbility advocacy colleague who is also director of a university center, we discussed the best way for my contacts to reach her. Email, she told me and then inhaled an incomplete breath that caught a second before letting it go. She looked at me and she smiled a half smile and with a look of pain in her eyes explained that at the end of each workday she left to take care of her mother who had just moved into assisted living. I knew that pain. And, like me, this friend has a special needs child. I see other mothers, who like me have a special needs child. Only, their child is riding in the back seat, an elderly parent in the passenger seat. My landlord, too, just shared that he and his wife are taking care of her aging parents. We agreed with resignation that the crises and demands at times of this challenge too often made life a living hell.

Each time I see this scenario, each time I hear about it, a real-life drama of contemporary culture played over and over again in my city and the across our country, I am reminded. As our aging population lives longer, too often in poor mental and physical health, this phenomena has become our norm. I am reminded of the five or so years that the lone older sister back home became my parent's caretaker, eventually leaving her job to assume the full-time demands of their aging needs.

This sister tells me now that she is just beginning to regain the equilibrium of her life. And that is because, one year ago today, our family's role in this phenomena ended with the death of our last remaining parent, my father.

Though I've frequently wondered, no time have I made, in the fall out of my life since his death, to read what the literature says it means for a daughter to lose a father and for siblings to lose their last remaining parent. I only know that for me it turned my world upside down. Psychological theory proclaims that children bury difficult memories because they are too damaging with which said child to cope and survive in the life before them. But those memories, stored in the subterranean vault of their emotional core do come out in a myriad of ways. For me those deeply embedded memories of emotional abuse from within our functional dysfunctional family helped create barriers around my heart. A harshness. And, a pattern of gravitating toward relationships with men who could love me the least. Men who best mimicked the lack acceptance for my core that my dear, loving well-intentioned parents–products of their hard-times depression-era youth–brought forth from the lack of acceptance they had for themselves.

The Grace of it all comes for my oldest sister in being able to breathe and live freely again without the demands of parents who had reversed their roles and became demanding little children. The Grace comes in knowing that she is free of this responsibility and can make plans, have lunches with friends and travel again. The Grace of it all for me comes in knowing that my parents loved me and my sisters dearly. They left us many legacies of varying sorts. And, because of my father's death, I can now slowly walk, gingerly, step by step down into the cellar of my soul, grasping the side rail with one hand, a loving guide clutching the elbow of my other arm. And there I am now sorting through the debris that has blocked my path. I can see and reach for the black grime and grease laden switch of the grinding engine of pain that has been cranking and driving my tired, weary spirit these nearly 52 years. Now, I can fully embrace the little girl whose mother never ended the Electra complex (Jung) and know that I am my own source of validation, shelter and sustenance…Not Daddy or anyone else that on some subconscious level I believed  would gallop up on a large, white, rippling muscled horse and save me.

One year ago today the door to my heart was blasted wide open.

Grateful.

Photo: copyrighted, Leisa A. Hammett. Taken with a Droid smart phone from my dashboard while driving home to South Carolina, Christmas, 2011; I-40 E, approaching Newport, Tenn., exit.