End of an Era

When you lose a parent, you think that it will be the milestones that will make you sad - their birthday, the date they died, father's or mother's day - but this is not always the case, and especially not after the first year.

No - it is the things that remind you of being of child that make you grieve the most.  And it is hard to tell with that kind of grief what you are grieving for - your parents, your family, a simpler and more innocent time, your own childhood.  But it is a powerful emotion and it can be quite overwhelming at times.

It is my experience that people remember their childhoods in two distinct kinds of ways: they tend to over-romanticize them, everything was pretty much happy (save one or two things) or they tend to remember them  as worse than they were (and this is NOT to downplay any one who HAD a truly terrible childhood - I worked for children's services for awhile and I know how truly terrible it can be).  Fortunately for me, I fall into the former category; my childhood was not always easy, but I look back on it very fondly and feel fortunate that my temperament and my memories make that so.

What typically sets me off now about my parents being gone is catching a TV show from the 1960s and 1970s, and the death of someone from their era.

So the announcement of the death of Jean Stapleton yesterday made me feel a little weepy last night.

Jean Stapleton was a brilliant actress.

I know she had a wonderful stage career prior to the 1970s, but it was her seminal portrait of Edith Bunker that endeared her to millions.

Time magazine's website has a wonderful homage to this character, much better than I could write, but that's not what I wanted to talk about anyway.

Edith Bunker, and Jean Stapleton herself, looked like most of the mothers I knew in the early 1970s.  This was the time before the mothers did all they could to continue to look glamorous and young well into their 60s and 70s.  In the 1970s, all of the mothers I knew, including my own, had shorter haircuts and sensible shoes and house dresses.  They would not have considered donning blue jeans and long hair was for young children.

Now granted, I lived in a small town in a small part of the world,  I don't think the late 1960s came to NB until the mid to late 1970s!  But all that being said - we could relate to the Bunkers.  They looked like people we knew.  There were people like Archie, but it was the quiet Ediths that were changing the world and who loved their children enough to let them be dissidents and challenge authority and began to question authority themselves.  Much has been written about the young people of the 1960s and 1970s, but I often think of their mothers, who taught them to be the freethinkers that they were.

My mother and father loved All in the Family and in the days of 12 channels, we watched the show together as a family.  And I often think these shows had greater importance, since there was so few shows and everyone was pretty much watching the same thing.  So Norman Lear had a bully pulpit and he used it to educate through social satire.  And if you couldn't take your eyes off Archie, it was Edith who was the heart of the family.  In my family, my mother was the stronger character, though like Edith, she was more quickly able to adapt to the changing times and embrace those changes.  My dad was often Mr. Establishment early on, and struggled a bit with the social upheaval.  But their kids made them change, just as they were impacting my brother and sister and me along the way, imparting their values and social mores.

After All in the Family, Jean Stapleton continued to act for many years, appearing last in one of my favourite comfort movies You've Got Mail.

She lived a good, long, and celebrated life - you can't ask for more than that.  But I will still miss her.  And I will miss my mother.  And 12 channels.  And yes, I know it is pure nostalgia, but I can't help it!

RIP Jean Stapleton - you were a heroine.

Have a happy Sunday.  I plan to weed today and maybe do some writing.  Stay safe out there