Martha Whitmore Hickman

"The author brings a keen intellect, a rich educational background, humor and an acute sense of the world of nature to her observations about the relationships of middle age.. Head and shoulders above most inspirational books," --- Chandler Grannis, former editor-in-chief of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

This book started to be a series of mainly light-hearted essays on the various adaptations often required of us--and new adventures open to us--as we enter our middle years.

Sometimes the dreams we had become more urgent, and we shift our vocation. A friend of mine gave up his Ph.D faculty position at a university and became a nurse: he wanted to be a writer and his academic work left no time for writing. A nurse comes on duty and when his hours are up, he can go home and pick up his story where he left off yesterday.

For women who have been care-givers to young children and home, a whole world opens up--as the loved, familiar world closes down--when the children are at school all day.

Also, as the children mature, the nature of our parenthood changes. We are no longer the admired and wise parent; somtimes we are obstacles in the way of
changing times and mores, clinging to our hopelessly old-fashioned ideas. On one point of disagreement about appropriate behavior, my daughter queried me with, "You can't expect me to be stuck with your hangups!" Such shifts of behavior in children--and in parents as we try to act wisely but still not be "the enemy" require a good bit of patience and negotiation.

There are good things, too, as we see our children become poised young people, competent in their own right, winning the state spelling bee, playing in the regional orchestra, baseball heroes hoisted on the shoulders of team-mates while the stadium echoes with their name.

We may, as middle-aged adults, become more sensitive to the beauty of the world as we are forced to acknowledge we will not be here forever.

We joke about "the mid-life crisis," but it is often just that. Marriages break up. Our health may begin to show signs of wear. But we are basically still strong, attractive, enjoying life.

So, I had my outline and my contract, and was excited about getting on with my book as soon as we got home from vacation. Then,in the middle of our vacation, my daughter took that fateful horseback ride and died. Now what about my sprightly book on middle age?

Of course that was the least of my quandaries in those tragic days, but the publisher was reassuring: "Just wait. We'd still like you to do the book, but don't hurry. When it's time for you to begin to write again, you'll know."

So here is the book, with a different title and a different cover, and an Epilogue added when the second edition was published. It still has its light-hearted moments, but it is also permeated with the acknowledgement that loss of one kind or another is often the most pressing item on the agenda of middle life. The book is full of family stories--the strains our daughter's death put upon her brothers and her father and me, and also the comfort and wisdom we gave to each other. There is a chapter on "Faith and Personal History"--on the "signs and wonders" that on occasion lifted us from our sadness into ineffable joy--how a flock of cardinals or a hovering butterfly or a sudden wind on a still day seemed messengers from her--glowing lights in this noontime of our lives.

My beloved father died at eighty, after a 6-month illness, most of it spent in hospitals. This is partly a journal of those roller coaster months of hope and discouragement and of how we as a family dealt with that as we saw the end coming. It is also a collection of treasured stories--memories triggered by the changing circumstances of our life, as well as family stories passed on through the years.

I didn't write this book during my father's illness, though I did make a few cursory notes. I had neither the time nor the will, caught up as we all were with our grief and uncertainty, the daily development of his illness, the arrangements for travelling to be with him, conferring with my brother and two sisters about the state of our parents and who could go when to visit them.

But after my father died and we had buried his ashes on a green hillside in Massachusetts in a cemetery plot that contained graves going back to the time of the Civil War, after my life in Tennessee began to return to its usual patterns, I found that the easiest--and to my mind best--way to continue to work through the grief of losing my father was, being a writer, to write about it. I would do it as a journal. My notes stood me in good stead; some dates would never leave my mind; I would conjecture the rest.

The book begins with the phone call from my parents saying they couldn't come for Thanksgiving, as we had planned. My father just didn't feel up to the trip. Maybe in the Spring they could come.

After they had hung up I sat with the phone still in my hand. We had recently moved from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. I had so anticipated showing my mother and father around the house, pointing out where we had put the colonial chest, the child's rocker that had been my father's "baby chair," which held now the porcelein doll my mother had won in a national writing contest when she was eight years old. We wanted to show them our new city, take them to church with us, have them meet some of our new friends. Somehow their presence would "sanctify" our house--and now...Would my father ever be strong enough to come?

My husband, who had been on the phone in another room, came in to console me. We recalled that on our customary summer family reunion, my father, who was not given to long speeches, had surprised us all by holding forth at some length about the course his life had taken, his contentment, his pride in all of us. It had been a moving time. Did he sense then that he would be leaving us soon?

I flew to Massachusetts. My father had had a dizzy spell and the doctor had hospitalized him. After dinner I drove my mother to the hospital. As my father and I hugged each other, a sob shivered through his thin frame. "I'm glad to see you," he murmured. Tears filled my eyes, and his. The moment is as clear in my mind today as it was then.

The book follows the course of his illness, the many episodes of doctor visits, of phone conversations about his health.

But I wanted to leave more than a grief-saturated record of my father, and as other aspects of who he was came to mind, I recorded them, too--his sense of humor, understated and quick. When my son received as a birthday gift a gangling white skeleton puppet, and asked the observing family, "What shall I name him?" my father's immediate suggestion: "Why not call him Bone-apart?" We all cheered.

There were other stories that stayed with me. My father had had typhoid fever as a child, and, though well on the mend, could not go back to school for awhile and he told how, restless, needing something to do, he used to go down to the woods and watch the sap drip into the pails his father had hung on the maple trees, and I see him even now, taking comfort and companionship from nature, which was one of his loves, and probably anticipating the maple syrup this would boil down to, to lay on fresh snow for maple candy,or pour over pancakes or hot oatmeal.

Then high school, and on to Amherst College, and in due time, a soldier in World War I.

And then his marriage to my mother, an "outlander" from upstate New York, the coming of their four children, his long and distinguished career as a lawyer in the city of his birth. Family adventures--Sunday rides in the country, or, when he thought the time was right, rides up into the nearby hills of Rock Valley in our annual search for arbutus--fingering among the leaves and wiry stems to find the tiny pink flowers, put some in a paper bag brought for that purpose, take them home to trim and put in vases, so that for days the house was permeated with the fragrance of arbutus.

My father loved to garden, and during the season of planting and growth, if the weather was good, he would don what we came to call his "hand-painted pants"--a pair of khaki trousers well decorated with residual paint from various fix-it projects--go outside and work in the several gardens he had made along the borders of our lot. If it was baseball season, he would come in from time to time to check the radio to see how the Red Sox were doing.

So the book is a portrait of the man, as well as of the insidiously growing cancer that would take his life. It could be the story of many loving families facing the death of a parent. Yet the human story has endless variations, and in celebration of one particular man, one particular family, and to be company and solace to other families going through similar rough waters, and to ease the aching grief I continued to feel for the loss of my father,and to leave for my children stories of their grandfather--in many of which they had played a part, and all of this in a context we had learned to accept--which was to wait, and to continue to be what we have learned so well from the person beside whose bed we wait--to continue to be loving--as we have done for a long, long time, and which we will continue to do, long after the waiting is over.

Don't be alarmed. There are men in the stories, too.
Aging doesn't mean old, though we are quick to make that association.

In one of these stories, a middle-aged couple is on their way to the graduation from college of their youngest child. But what grieves the mother's heart is that he shouldn't be the youngest: a younger daughter had been killed in an accident, so the time for the graduation of "the youngest" is all wrong--until she realizes she is passing up the many joys she has in her life right now--including an infant grandchild, who has also, all unknowing, come to his uncle's graduation.

Another couple, of retirement age, is urged by their married daughter and her husband to come and live with them--to exchange the cold winter weather of New England for the warm south. They protest for awhile, but then decide to give it a try. The parents and grandson welcome them, they are happy. But are they? They love their family and will continue to see them. But stay there forever?

An elderly couple (now they Are old) has been struggling for years to maintain their own home--though it is by no means their dream house. Ever since their marriage, in their early middle years, they have been imagining the grand home they will one day acquire--high ceilings, a grand piano, chairs covered with royal brocade, lush carpet. Now they are old, circumstances (including repeated robberies) have forced them to a retirement home. Guess what they find there?

There are widows in this book,too--one, with her daughter's help, is having a yard sale to reduce her possessions. So many items induce sadness for what she is losing, what she is giving up--until an elderly woman from Holland comes with tears of joy, holding in her hand an embroidered cloth and napkins like the set she remembers from the childhood home she and her mother had had to flee, never to return.

Another widow feels proprietary about the church potato masher, and now she is faced with change, change, and more change. She will take charge of the potato masher for one more church supper, even though the other ladies are skeptical. Will it work one more time?

A retired teacher, faced with her eagerly anticipated freedom, realizes how structured and predictable her life as a teacher has been, and finds herself panicky at what to do until she passes a country yard sale and sees, among the butter churns and rag rugs and battered kettles a new image for whar her life could become.

There is more--the story of a grandmother who wonders whether she will ever again lay eyes on the child her now dead daughter had long ago given up for adoption. Then along comes a letter from a Parent Finders Association. They would like to know...

And a woman who has worked selflessy long into her old age to feed and counsel homeless men and women who have come to her church, finds that her purse has been stolen, and tired and disillusioned, decides to give up and go home to Mississippi, until an entirely unexpected act of grace occurs.

A middle-aged widow agrees, at her daughter's urging,
to go on a boat trip to England. At first she is reluctant to go, thinking her sadness at losing her husband would overpower the trip, but as she becomes well acquainted with a fine widower, she wonders, to her surprise, whether she is falling in love.

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