10 Stories About Aging Parents, Grandparents and Retirement Plans That Feel Different With the Winter Holidays Approaching Soon

My mom passed when I was 6, so my grandma, 71, raised me to avoid foster care. A classmate, unaware she was my grandma, said, “Who dug up that old fossil?” I laughed along but I never forgave myself. 40 years later, I found her diary.

That day’s entry said, “My Danny laughed today when that boy called me a fossil. I was right there at the fence in my brown coat, so I heard it, and I watched him see me first. I’m not hurt, I want that written down. I’m 74 and I own a mirror.
What scares me is Mrs. Reyes from the county coming Thursday to decide if I’m too old to keep him. If a 9-year-old thinks I look ancient, so will she. So I put the blue coat on a plan at Sears, $4 a week. Tomorrow I will walk him to the gate standing up very straight. I need 9 more years to get him to 18. Fossils last, so I’ll manage.”

I found it in a storage unit I’d paid $40 a month on since she passed and never once walked into. It was in a shoebox with her reading glasses. I read that page standing up, then sat down on a box marked KITCHEN.

The next entry was one line. “He took my hand at the gate this morning. Nobody asked him to. Walked me to the door in front of everybody and held on till the bell. I don’t know what got into him and I’m not asking.”

I remember that morning. I never knew why I did it. I only knew I couldn’t let go of her hand, and I thought I was apologizing. She never said a word about it, and I never said sorry.

The blue coat was in the unit too, in a dry cleaner bag, with the Sears receipt pinned to the sleeve. PAID IN FULL. I put it on over my jacket. It didn’t come close to fitting, and I wore it out to the car anyway.

• My grandma never liked me. At least that’s what I told myself for like 25 years. She’s my dad’s mom, doesn’t hug, calls me by my sister’s name half the time. Anyway, I had my son 3 days before my birthday and totally missed it, because, you know, newborn.
  The next afternoon a nurse wheeled her into my room with a Pyrex dish on her lap. Pumpkin pie. My birthday cake has always been pumpkin pie and I had no idea she even knew that.
  Her hands are so bad she can’t hold a fork anymore, so I’m pretty sure my aunt Deb baked it while Grandma sat in a chair and pointed. I asked if it was too sweet. She said, “I put extra.” That was the entire conversation.
  She’s 89 this Christmas and I’m making the pie myself this year. She says I’ll mess up the crust. Probably.

• So my grandma is 88 and she announced at my cousin’s birthday that Thanksgiving is at her house, again. Fourteen stairs. The oven door has been held shut with a dish towel since 2016. And I know I can’t win this one.
  She watched my daughter three days a week when she was a baby, because she walked into the daycare I picked and walked right back out. Before that she gave me free rent in a house she owned near my college, as long as I “kept an eye on” the other tenants, who were all 20.
  So I don’t really get to argue. I just told her I’m bringing the turkey and she’s allowed to sit. She said, “We’ll see.” She also said my gray hair makes her feel old. I’m 41.

• My mom retired in September after 31 years as a school secretary. Everyone asked about the cruise. There’s no cruise.
  When she was 19 she got stuck at the Greyhound station in Pittsburgh on Christmas Eve, crying because she had $6 and no ride, and some lady handed her a paper bag. Socks, a clementine, a candy cane. Every December since, she takes a bunch of those bags back to the same station. It used to be like 15, between shifts.
  This year she’s making 40 and she started in October because “I have time now.” Her spare room is full of Dollar General socks and my dad keeps finding clementine peels in his coat pockets. I took Friday off to help pack. She said I’m not allowed to ask about her retirement plans.

• My grandpa is 89 and the farm goes on the market after New Year’s. He’s been in assisted living since September and complains about the coffee every single day.
  Years ago he told my mom that whatever the cows and sheep brought in each year was mine, for school. No speech, he just said it and went back out to the barn. I got two degrees off that.
  Last week he asked me to drive him out there one more time, in my car because his truck has no heat. He walked the whole fence line with his cane, stopped at the gate by the old water trough, and said, “Your mother thinks I’ll be sad.” I asked if he was. He said, “A little.”
  Then he asked if I brought snacks. I had Cheez-Its. We’re going back Christmas Eve if the realtor gives us the lockbox code.

• Every December my grandparents took my sister and me into the city on the train. Matinee, hot chocolate in paper cups, then lobster at some place in Brooklyn where the waiters knew Grandpa by name.
  Grandma is 86 now and Grandpa refuses trains, so this year I bought three tickets and booked a car. He pretended not to want to go for about nine seconds. At the theater an usher walked them down the aisle, one on each arm, and Grandma held the Playbill in her lap like she used to.
  Grandpa fell asleep in act two. He always does. She elbowed him anyway. At intermission she told me we never saw the end of the 1994 one, because my sister and I fell asleep.

• My grandpa is 91 and his hands shake too much to hold a chisel. He's the least affectionate man I've ever met, never said "I love you" once. But every Christmas there was something wooden under the tree with my name burned into the bottom.
  When I was 7 it was a wrestling ring out of pine boards and actual rope, because I'd sat on my plastic one. When I was 11 it was a case lined with felt for my handheld game, since the screen cracked and my parents couldn't replace it.
  Last Saturday he called me into the garage and said, "You hold. I'll tell you where." Four hours to make a spice rack for my grandma. He made me redo the first cut and the second. At the end he ran his thumb along the edge and said, "Hm."
  I burned my initials next to his on the back. Grandma put the cumin on it right away. Wrong shelf.