During the year, his sister and his brother Tom’s widow both passed away. They were the last of their generation, as my sister noted.

It rained this morning while I was writing. My Hawaiian side sees it as a sign, a blessing of sorts. Perhaps.

It is only in retrospect that I realize how difficult it was to blog through my dad’s final two years, a task that required attending to details and feelings. During those two long years, I also spent a lot of time going through his collection of papers and photographs, trying to lift out details of his life that I could ask him about, hoping to trigger bits of his remaining memory that might seed conversation.

Since he died, I let all of that go. Gone is gone. He hasn’t appeared in my dreams, which I think is a product of my firmly closing that door in my mind, for now at least. I realize that I haven’t touched any of those boxes of his stuff since he’s been gone. That entire task was suspended, pending…pending what? I don’t know.

Perhaps now I’m ready to look back at the positive remnants. In addition to those as-yet still not sorted mementos, I’ve got a few moments of video, some voice recordings done with my iPhone while visiting at the nursing home, and my written observations along the way. Hopefully, with the passage of time, I’ll be able to keep those segregated from my own vivid memory of his agonizing last days.

We’ll see.

She is slowing down, and her hearing is bad, but her memory is still pretty sharp.

We put some chicken on the grill, added some salad and pickies, opened a bottle of champagne, and enjoyed the occasion.

She picked up a book about the annual Hawaii Printmakers gift prints, which go way back. We have several of them, and she was having fun reading through the artist profiles and exclaiming over the many of them she knew at the university.

A couple of days later, we took her shopping. She explored the Goodwill Thrift Store on Beretania, then wanted to go to Savers. So off to Savers we sent, where she tired herself out looking at “stuff.”

In any case, here’s my mom, Helen Lind on her 97th birthday.

“Old old” refers in this case to those over age 85. It still sounds so far away, but perhaps I’m one of those Jacoby writes about who simply deny the realities of aging.

Her lede:

I RECENTLY turned 65, just ahead of the millions in the baby boom generation who will begin to cross the same symbolically fraught threshold in the new year to a chorus of well-intended assurances that “age is just a number.” But my family album tells a different story. I am descended from a long line of women who lived into their 90s, and their last years suggest that my generation’s vision of an ageless old age bears about as much resemblance to real old age as our earlier idealization of painless childbirth without drugs did to real labor.

Jacoby’s attempt to look ahead with clarity rather than denial is pretty tough to read, as we’re not too far behind her on the baby boomer calendar.

My parents were both relatively active and clear thinking until about age 90, although my dad lost abilities quickly from then on, and my mother, nearing 97, is now showing many more signs of her age. But, with luck, from today’s vantage point, aspiring to 90 pretty good years sounds pretty good.

What happens then? Our situation appears complicated because we don’t have children to step in at some future point. Then you hear the horror stories of what happens in families where children arrive on the scene with their own less-than-generous motives, whether greed or anger, and you realize that families can be either a treasure or a curse. Luck of the draw, it seems.

I have to think that the baby boomer voting block is going to demand political attention to end-of-life issues. The right to die on your own terms is certainly one of those that legislatures are going to have to deal with. Decades ago, I thought Hawaii had a chance to be a leader in this policy area, but that seems only a remote possibility now. I hope I’m wrong.