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April 29, 2008

Dad's groceries and the inevitability of death

My friend Bruce and I made a run to the local H.E.B. supermarket this evening, chatting all the way about the economy and families and, of course, groceries, and as we were checking out, I made a fond recollection of my Dad, who absolutely loved the grocery store. He would wander slowly through, pondering various items, buying too much of this or that. Never hurrying to finish and leave... he really loved shopping for groceries. Bruce got this immediately: our parents were raised during the depression, and wandering through a well-stocked supermarket with enough money to buy whatever you might need made them feel just incredibly secure. We take it for granted today, but it really meant something to them.

And we probably shouldn't take it too much for granted. Grocery prices are accelerating, and food items you took for granted before now may be out of reach in a couple of years. What would my Dad think if he was here today?

(Coincidentally I met earlier today with Mary Matthiesen of Conversations for Life! about dying... thinking how profoundly your life changes after your parents have died. We take our supermarkets for granted, and we're in denial about death... we don't talk about it. Mary's thinking (and I heartily agree) that we need more conversations about the reality and implications of death. Because we avoid the subject and hide the fact, it's a huge mystery for so many of us, often experienced as something more traumatic than it needs to be - we've all got stories, she says, of the death of a parent or someone we know, and often the experience is pretty terrible. We don't have a framework for it, or a tradition (they're fading). We fear rather than accept the inevitability.

Pondering this as my eyes get fuzzy.

Visits to the grocery store don't leave me feeling terribly secure.

jon posted this at 11:38 PM
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