We all have watershed moments in the course of our lives. Days when, from then on, things become notably different. The day you left home, the day you got married (or moved in together), the day you had your first child – all days signifying something important, and probably good, was happening in your life.

Most of us have also experienced watershed moments that signified a loss. The day a relationship finally came to an end. The move to a new and less desirable house. The death of a friend or – more so – a spouse.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the genesis of the word ‘watershed’. It seems that it was originally a geographical term for a place where water coming off a mountain divided into two separate rivers, in other words, a turning point.

And that is exactly what it feels like, when your life is either enhanced or diminished by some change.

A grandson in our lives

My husband and I have been very close to one of our two grandsons by the accident of circumstances. His mother was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer when he was eight months old, her husband (my son) was trying to complete a Ph.D., and they needed a lot of help – and fast. (She eventually recovered, I am happy to say, and is now cancer-free.)

We cobbled together a number of people to look after the baby, including the other grandmother who came from the US for the purpose, two outsiders and myself. And, somehow, we dealt with his various needs for the next months and more.

My husband and I bought a baby bed, a highchair, a pile of nappies (diapers) and all the accoutrements of babyhood so that he could come to our house on short notice. Which he did perhaps once a week or so. Sometimes more.

As he grew into a toddler and small child, our house was constantly responding to his changing needs, but it was always ready for a visit. The baby clothes became children’s clothes. We always had his favourite food of the moment.

His presence was the norm

My son’s old room became the grandson’s room and even my son’s place at our dining room table became his place. His little slippers were always in our front hall.

He felt completely at home in our house.

And then when he was six, his parents decided that the best primary school for his needs was one that was a ten-minute walk from our house (and 45 minutes by bus from their flat). To make their lives easier, we agreed that he could stay over with us on one night a week (and sometimes more). And we looked after him after school on other days, as needed.

To make a long story short, this child has been part of our day-to-day lives for 11 years. Some of this time was hard work – getting him up for school on days when I dearly wanted to lie in bed, going up the hill to collect him on cold and rainy days, seeing to his needs when I had other more pressing projects and so forth.

But taken as a whole, it has been both fun and deeply fulfilling. He is a very loving child, lively and interesting to talk to and full of opinions.

He has filled our house with his enthusiasms. He has kept us on our toes. And in some strange way, he has kept us young. Grandchildren do.

Our watershed moment

And suddenly, it is coming to an end. Several weeks ago, he finished at the nearby primary school. More drastically, the parents are going to live abroad for a year (with him) for an academic secondment. They leave shortly.

This lively grandson will no longer be coming to our house every week. Indeed, he won’t be coming at all for a year. His slippers are no longer in our front hall.

This is sadness enough.

But I realised that when they return, life will not go back to the old arrangements. The by-then adolescent will go to a local secondary school, where he will undoubtedly get caught up with friends, after-school activities and homework – all in his local area.

He will come to see us from time to time, of course, but he will no longer have that easy relationship that comes from seeing each other several times a week. We may feel close – I certainly hope that we do – but it won’t be in the same quotidian way.

I must quickly add that this is all right and good for him. Living abroad will be a terrific experience. He needs to grow up and find his own way. It was bound to happen.

But it is definitely a watershed moment for us. I watched him being driven home from our house for the last time in a while, smiling in the back seat of the car.

There was more than a slight lump in my throat.

This article was first published by Sixtyandme.com (see https://sixtyandme.com/watershed-moments/)

A lot of people, I find, have a close friend who does not make sense. Someone who just doesn’t ‘fit’ with other aspects of their life, and no one from outside can quite understand why they are friends at all.

Such friendships can be especially meaningful and sometimes surprising. Often, these are started at school, where the personalities of those involved were unformed and their subsequent life trajectories very different.

My young friend

My friend of this type was a young man with not long to live. I met him through work when I was close to 50 and he was just under 30. He was German, I was American, both living in London, although we first met at a conference in Belgium.

More significantly, he was a gay man, and I was a married woman with two children. He had grown up poor in a mining town in Germany and had taken up nursing when he left school at 16 because the only real alternative was becoming a miner. I came from a professional family in New York and had three degrees.

And he had been living with AIDS for five years, whereas I knew nothing about the disease. He was, indeed, highly active in the HIV/AIDS community, seen as something of a leader amongst them. I liked to keep to myself and never led anybody anywhere.

What did we see in each other?

I saw a very bright, sensitive but troubled man, who liked to reflect on deeper issues. I guess he saw some of the same qualities in me, although I never asked him. We certainly had similar temperaments, mixing reflectiveness with a sense of humour.

He also liked to challenge himself and those around him – and I found that a very inspiring (and somehow intimate) quality.

I also learned that his mother had died when he was 18 months old, and he claimed he had been looking for her (in some unspecified way) all his life. He was friends with a number of older women, of whom I was one. None of us knew each other.

Doing things together

We used to meet fairly often, mostly for lunch, although he did come to my house on several occasions.

At one lunch, we first planned what was to become a joint book based on interviews with people with AIDS and HIV, taking place at an international conference he was organising.

As is the case with Covid-19 today, the world was awash with statistics regarding the numbers diagnosed, but I was unaware of many personal stories. I knew that these can have a bigger impact on people than statistics. This strengthened our friendship and proved an important milestone for me in creating books based around interviews.

A special lunch

And there was a particularly poignant lunch. Towards the end of his life, he was in and out of hospital with various ailments and I would visit him there. On one occasion, he said, I thought jokingly, “Let’s have lunch next week.” I said sure, with a smile. But he meant it. And told me so.

The following week, I turned up at the hospital, finding him very frail and attached to a drip, but in his street clothes. It did not seem remotely feasible to take him outside, but he said he had cleared the venture with the staff.

We chatted for a bit and then, being a trained nurse, he unplugged himself from the drip and said, grinning, “Let’s go.”

It was a beautiful October day, sunny and crisp. There was a good restaurant nearby, and we headed toward it very slowly.

He was incredibly exuberant about the beauty of the day, conveying to me that feeling for ordinary life that can only come to someone long confined to a hospital bed. Some people stared – he was covered in Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions – but he carried on with dignity.

We ordered lunch and talked about all sorts of things of no great importance. I remember him exclaiming at the presentation of the food – and eating much of it, although his hunger was necessarily limited. I simply marvelled that we were there at all.

And when we had finished, we walked slowly, and somewhat sadly, back to the hospital, where he climbed onto his bed and re-attached his drip.

His death

He died about two months later. I sat with him for a long time on the day he died, although I went home and was replaced by another female friend by the time he died.

A few months later, yet another older female friend and I scattered his ashes in the sea outside of Brighton, as had been his wish. We watched the carnations she had bought float slowly away, went for a brief tea and headed home full of unspoken thoughts.

I will never forget either day.