Stolen Identity

My eleven-year-old granddaughter Kelley posted a whine on her Facebook page. She has friended me, so I get to read her posts.
Kelley: “Why does everyone keep changing?!?!?!?!?”

Grandma Judy: “Because it's a Rule. Everything changes. Always. You just have to learn to turn on a dime. Fortunately, though, you change, too.”

Kelley: “I guess I need 2 learn 2 accept it. *sigh**”

Grandma Judy: “That's Rule #2.”

Kelley: “lol :D” (For the unitiated, lol is shorthand for Laugh Out Loud. The colon represents two eyes, and the capital D represents an open, laughing mouth. You have to read it sideways.)

Grandma Judy (later): “Want to hear Rule #3?”

Kelley: “Go for it.” Unfortunately, I hadn't yet figured out Rule #3.

But then my wallet was stolen on Amtrak, and after a week, I knew Rule #3.

A friend called me up. “I’m so sorry your identity was stolen,” she said.

For a moment I was confused. My…identity? Then I realized what she referred to. My wallet contained several credit cards, my ATM card, driver’s license, social security card, health insurance cards, library card…and I had spent the last week getting all of them replaced.

DMV was the most interesting. To get a replacement license I had to present myself in person, with an official birth certificate, proof of current address, proof of full legal name, proof of US citizenship, and proof of Social Security number. My passport provided some of that. But without these “identity proofs,” for the purpose of driving my car, I didn’t exist.

Which takes me back to the original comment from my friend. My confusion arose from the way she started the sentence. My sister had died two months ago, and my mother died a few weeks after that, so I was accustomed to hearing sentences begin with “I’m so sorry.”

But… stolen identity. It was a perfect metaphor.

It’s been eighteen years since I took early retirement from academia. My intention was to re-invent myself as a writer and publisher. Instead, my reinvented identity for that part of my life was Caregiver. First, my stepson Lee had lung cancer, and his four very young children needed steady, predictable nurturing. The day Lee died, my younger brother Tim was diagnosed with melanoma and needed care of various kinds for three years. A few months after Tim died, my mother had her first of several strokes, the beginning of progressive dementia. For fourteen years I was her primary caregiver, even during her last years in an assisted living facility. Finally, my youngest sibling in the last stages of breast cancer, needed to be picked up at her home and taken to her chemotherapy treatments every week, a welcome opportunity to reconnect with her as my sister. When she went into hospice, she needed a new level of family caregiving, and her family was emotionally and physically tapped out. I filled in.

But now? They are all dead, or in the case of Lee’s children, all grown up. There is no longer anyone in my life who needs that kind of care. It’s an identity I thought I would be glad to relinquish. Instead, it leaves a surprisingly significant hole. Who am I, really? What parts of my identity have been laid aside until “later”? This will not be as easy as showing up at the DMV with the appropriate documents.

And anyway, if I could do it that easily, I would only have re-established an identity that has run its course.

I added a final comment to the thread on Kelley's Facebook page: “Rule #3 is you ‘get to’ (HAVE TO) keep reinventing yourself. That goes on as long as you are alive. Things change, and you have to reassess who you are in light of that change. Over and over. If you can't do that, you're toast.”

At this point my two daughters chimed in on the comment thread. My first daughter’s one-word comment was simply, “Toast.”

The second daughter’s comment: “You forgot about Rule #4: ‘things never change, not really.’”

I’m working on Rule #5. Or maybe I should just start over.