David Sedaris On Getting Old And Mortality

Full disclosure: I like everything that David Sedaris writes and I’d recommend his stories without blinking. I find his family stories particularly good because it’s complicated to write about parents with compassion and humor, especially when your relationship with them is not tip-top.

Father Time tackles questions of ageing and mortality that, from some point on, you have to look in the face and deal with. In Sedaris’s case – as for many of us – this happened when his father fell in the kitchen, a day before his ninetyfifth birthday party. Confusion about the place he was at, mistaking relatives for other people and minor incidents ensued, so that the family decided to put Sedaris’s father in a retiring home. How do you offer old people dignity in their last years? How do you learn to get along with your family in order to prevail over misfortunes?

Well, David Sedaris doesn’t necessarily answer these questions, but with his confiding tone and approachable air, he invites the reader to contemplate them.

I couldn’t help but think of Mayview, the nursing home my father put his mother in, back in the mid-seventies. It seemed like only yesterday that I’d gone with him to see her. If now here I was, visiting him in a similar place, wouldn’t it be me, in the blink of an eye, in my own retirement center, me the frail widower reduced to a single room? Only I won’t have children to look after me, the way my father has Lisa, who had been extraordinary, and my brother Paul and Amy and Gretchen. My sister-in-law Kathy had outdone everyone, stopping by sometimes twice a day, taking Dad to lunch, rubbing lotion into his feet. I was the only exception. Me. Dave Chappelle.