How to talk about what you can't talk about

My parents are 95 and 91, and we never had “the talk.”

Well, we did have a talk once — the other talk — when I was 10 years old and my mother wanted to tell me about sex. She said the man chicken puts his penis inside the woman chicken and that’s how babies are made.

“I get it,” I said. (I was quick.) “So, Dad put his penis inside you and that’s how I was born.” My mother looked as if she would keel over. “No,” she said, gathering all the dignity and authority she could summon, “that’s just with chickens.” Thirty-four years old in 1957, she was doing her best to negotiate tricky shoals, but at the last minute she panicked and started paddling backward.

We didn’t do that much better when it was time to enlighten our son. My husband bought the book “What’s Happening to Me?” and attempted to read it with Jason when the boy was 10 and about to leave for summer camp. What fantasy my husband had regarding summer camp sexual adventure is a mystery still, but in any case, Jason didn’t want to have “the talk.” He put his fingers in his ears and hummed as my husband went on and on about hair and acne and even more disturbing aspects of adolescence.

Now, 57 years after my mother tried to teach me the facts of life, instead of bumping along in the shallows, we are all treading water at the deep end of life. 

Everything I read tells me I should be having a talk with my parents about their wishes for the future, meaning when they no longer have a future. Ask about their end-of-life choices, the articles say. Make sure they select a health proxy. Find out what measures they want taken in various dire medical situations. Do they want a DNR at some point? What point? And how do they feel about life support?

I read Atul Gawande’s new book, “On Being Mortal.” He writes with absolute clarity and deep compassion about being old, and how we adult children can help our parents move through their last years. He is an iconoclast, suggesting that we abandon the perfect safety and soul-killing sterility of many senior homes and facilities and find ways to help the elders live the way they want to, even if it means tolerating some risk.

Gawande says we should ask them how and where they want to live and then try to make it happen as best we can. He suggests that being frail and old isn’t a disease; it is a stage of life that doesn’t have to be medicalized. I had been asking my parents if they wanted to consider some kind of independent or assisted-living place where they could be together with help nearby and meals readily available. “It would be safer,” I said, before I read Gawande.

“Someone else could cook for you,” I offered.

“Cook for me?” my mom said. “Last night I made your father baked chicken and potato kugel, just the way he likes it. Who is going to do that?

“… We want to be here in our own place for as long as we can.” So, good, that was pretty definite, and my sister and I agreed that we would help them stay in their home as best we could. It wasn’t so difficult, after all, to talk about how they would live in the near future.

It was much trickier to broach the subject of their not living. Children, no matter how old, do not easily sit down with the parents they love to talk about how they might die and where they would like to be buried or cremated or consigned to the deep.

After years of basically avoiding the subject, I had my opening last week. I was with my parents and my mother said, “My brother” — Harry, 97 — “is furious with Eddie” — his son. Why? Because Eddie, she said, asked his father where he would like to be buried and if he has a plot someplace for his final resting place.

“Well,” I said, only slightly more nervous than my mother discussing chickens, “It’s not an entirely ridiculous question.… Have you thought about it yourselves?”

Silence.

Then she said, “I don’t care what you do with me when I’m dead.… Do whatever you like. You can stuff me and put me in the rocking chair.”

This is not going well, I thought.

“You can shove me in the closet with the bags you’re saving for the thrift shop,” my dad chimed in. “No one will notice me there.” He apparently was just warming up. “I want a four-gun salute,” he added. “I was only a captain.

“… I want to be buried next to Kennedy,” he hollered. “I want an eternal flame. And I want Jackie to be at the funeral.” 

“We all came from water,” my mother said. “Just throw us back in.”

So, Atul Gawande isn’t a mind reader. He can’t know how every elder parent will react to questions about their inevitable demise. I suppose my parents’ reactions are a defense of some kind, a protection against the unimaginable. I’m not sorry I mentioned it, because I know the question will percolate in their minds, and maybe they’ll offer some guidance for my sister and me at some point.

If not, at least we asked.

Later in the week, I was hanging out at home when the phone rang. It was my daughter. She said, “I have a serious question to ask you.”

“Just cremate me,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said, figuring I was just having a bad day, “but can I substitute yogurt for sour cream in a muffin recipe?” 

Randi Kreiss is a columnist for the Long Island Herald newspapers.