How to talk about what you can't talk about

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My parents are 95 and 91, and we never had “the talk.”

Well, we did have a talk once — the other talk — when I was 10 years old and my mother wanted to tell me about sex. She said the man chicken puts his penis inside the woman chicken and that’s how babies are made.

“I get it,” I said. (I was quick.) “So, Dad put his penis inside you and that’s how I was born.” My mother looked as if she would keel over. “No,” she said, gathering all the dignity and authority she could summon, “that’s just with chickens.” Thirty-four years old in 1957, she was doing her best to negotiate tricky shoals, but at the last minute she panicked and started paddling backward.

We didn’t do that much better when it was time to enlighten our son. My husband bought the book “What’s Happening to Me?” and attempted to read it with Jason when the boy was 10 and about to leave for summer camp. What fantasy my husband had regarding summer camp sexual adventure is a mystery still, but in any case, Jason didn’t want to have “the talk.” He put his fingers in his ears and hummed as my husband went on and on about hair and acne and even more disturbing aspects of adolescence.

Now, 57 years after my mother tried to teach me the facts of life, instead of bumping along in the shallows, we are all treading water at the deep end of life.

Everything I read tells me I should be having a talk with my parents about their wishes for the future, meaning when they no longer have a future. Ask about their end-of-life choices, the articles say. Make sure they select a health proxy. Find out what measures they want taken in various dire medical situations. Do they want a DNR at some point? What point? And how do they feel about life support?

I read Atul Gawande’s new book, “On Being Mortal.” He writes with absolute clarity and deep compassion about being old, and how we adult children can help our parents move through their last years. He is an iconoclast, suggesting that we abandon the perfect safety and soul-killing sterility of many senior homes and facilities and find ways to help the elders live the way they want to, even if it means tolerating some risk.

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