Decision was a gift

Thirty-one years ago, my wife and I made one of the scariest decisions of our lives.
It was 1983.
Our twins were 5 years old that June. They would turn 6 that July.
It had been a particularly rough year. My father had died that March after a 5-month gauntlet fighting lung cancer.
But the twins were looking forward to the annual trip to New Hampshire, where my wife’s family has had a rustic cabin in the woods since 1914.
The plan was that Connie’s parents would stop in Jay County on their way east from Illinois. They’d stay for a few nights then head on to New Hampshire, taking the twins with them. We would follow a few weeks later, joining them at the cabin.
That way, her folks would get some serious grandparent time; our twins were at that point their only grandchildren.
But when they arrived, the grandparents had some news.
They’d recently been in Philadelphia to attend Connie’s father’s 50th reunion at Haverford College, and while they were at the reunion, some troubling things had happened. Connie’s father had blacked out on at least one occasion, losing consciousness briefly. An old classmate, who happened to be a physician, took a look at him and diagnosed that he’d had at least one TIA.
We had no idea what a TIA was, though we quickly studied up. It stands for Transient Ischemic Attack, and is often referred to as a “mini-stroke.”
For Connie’s father, the impact seemed to be minimal. He felt fine and thought way too much fuss was being made about it. Not a problem, he said. Don’t worry so much.
So there we were.
Do we entrust the grandparents with our children for the two-day drive up to New England, knowing Connie’s father would be at the wheel and that he’d had a couple of “mini-strokes” the month before?
Scary stuff. But, in the end, we knew how crushing it would be for Connie’s parents — and her father in particular — if we had said no. There seemed at that moment only one choice to make: We had to trust them. We had to believe that if there were anything unusual or anything that disturbed her father that he would do the right thing for his granddaughters’ safety.
So we said good-bye one morning in the driveway and did our best not to talk about it and failed utterly when it came to not thinking about it.
Two days later, they called us from the cabin. The twins were having a ball.
Two weeks later, we joined them. Connie’s father was flourishing, delighting in his grandchildren. He seemed to know the leap of faith we had taken. One wonderful afternoon we drove to a point near the top of Mount Kearsarge, then hiked up to the summit. The twins bounded like mountain goats, and their grandfather was the picture of health.
It was about a month later that the real strokes came, a flurry of them that left him a fraction of his old self.
And we thought then — and we think now — that while it was a scary choice to entrust our children for that journey, we had made the right decision.[[In-content Ad]]