Six years ago this January my husband/partner of nearly 50 years died, literally in my arms. Surrounding us in that small room, the one we always thought of as his, were our sons, their wives and our grandchildren. It was five-year-old Jack who broke the silence: “Is Grampa dead?” Yes, we said, yes, he is.

It’s the room where we spent our first Christmas as parents, sleeping on the floor in front of the fire, our baby between us; yep, in the middle of a power outage. The room where my mother would, for a time, stay as she sank deeper into dementia, and then, years after that, where my father would die.

The months following Wally’s death would be a forgotten blur but for the columns I wrote here every week and later published as a book, Half of Every Couple. Without them I wouldn’t remember any of it, except the silence, the absence of his presence.

But spring came and the garden beckoned as it always has. One son, Ed and his wife, Tracee, lived a couple of miles away on Slab City Road. Together she and I transformed the spot where Wally and I had gardened all those years into a maze of raised beds; right down the middle we saved one for the ashes ­– cremains they call them – that had been sitting all winter on the cold woodstove in that small room where he died.

Wally’s cousin, Steve Case and wife Mig, came over one day to make a border of bricks all around the narrow bed. On Memorial Day the family gathered and took turns sprinkling the coarse, white grains that had been him all over the soil. When Jack wondered where the “rip” would be, I realized we needed a headstone at the end. A suitable stone was found in the woods along with a few other mementoes which have collected there.

As we worked in the garden it got harder for Tracee to leave. Finally, one day she said “I could just stay here.”

As soon as she left, I grabbed the tape measure and ran around the upstairs of this rambling “big house, little house, back house, barn” figuring out if there was enough room for a family of five.

Renovating, remodeling, building new space, moving the furniture: I love it all. Maybe, I thought, we could turn the four upstairs bedrooms and barn loft into another house.

Tracee was in on the idea from the beginning, but I worried about Ed. Would my son want to live with his mother? Apparently yes, but only if we each had our own kitchen. And two bathrooms upstairs. And a separate entrance.

Nearly a year later after consulting Camden National, a lawyer, an engineer and architect (thank you, Jack and Matt Silverio), and engaging Sam Cantrell to do the work, the five O’Briens moved in to their brand-new space.

And I moved downstairs.

I forgot to mention the summer and fall of free piles out by the road, the dozens of trips to the dump in Wally’s old Ford Ranger, as I purged the upstairs of five decades worth of stuff. Many of the decisions – what to keep, what to throw – were wrenching, but nothing can compare to the feeling of freedom as you pull out of the dump with an empty truck and sing all the way home.

And so, we began multi-generational living.

Now, having adult children living in our house was nothing new. Our sons had freely engaged in the boomerang era, those years when the kids (complete with beards and girl-friends) move back home. They’d been doing that since college, coming back every summer to rake blueberries, paint houses, bread clams, wash pots and pans, the many career opportunities the Midcoast offers young people. The only thing they never did was scoop ice cream, but the next generation has that covered.

After college they roamed far from home to find work and adventure, to Boston, Switzerland, Taiwan, Australia. But always there were those weeks or months, during vacation or between jobs when they’d land back here, home, where Mom cooked the meals and Dad offered advice.

It's been nearly five years since my upstairs family moved in, and there’s one thing I hadn’t reckoned with. The three little kids who were still putting baby teeth under the pillow, were going to turn into teenagers. One has followed her three older cousins to Camden Hills Regional High School, while the two youngest are middle schoolers. They play on teams, go to dances, sing in the chorus, build sets, go camping. They have their own phones for goodness sake.

And most significantly for a nearing-80-year-old grammy, they live in a different world. When I raised eyebrows at the skeleton-themed wrapping paper my granddaughter had chosen she patiently explained about Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before ChristmasNightmare Before Christmas and how it was their favorite holiday movie.

Christmas morning, once the stockings were emptied and the breakfast casserole (thanks Ed) and the sticky buns (thanks Hanji) and the Proseca (thanks grammie) were disposed of, we all sat around the living room getting Alexa to play the most outrageous holiday songs.

Don (my partner for the past five years) and I, bemused and confused as always by our offsprings’ conversation, actually had to laugh too, as they sang along to the various mash ups of traditional songs.

Thank goodness for each other, we say almost every day, having a contemporary to confide in and to confirm what we’re both thinking. We elders are truly living in a different world from the one we were raised in. Where all adults were Mr. or Mrs., where we all shared the same language and there were strict prohibitions to certain words, our own parents would be apoplectic at what passes for ordinary discourse today. Think of the explicit commercials for body care products!

The same kids who live in this modern version of civilization, i.e. the digital age, sat with heads bowed Christmas Eve as Pastor Elizabeth Barnum urged us to hold in our hearts, in our minds those whom we loved, those in need of our love – in our family, our community, the wider world.

Living in this three-generation family opens my eyes every day, remembering the struggles of raising kids, of making a living, and to realize that while so many conventions I was raised with have dropped away, the core values stay the same.

It’s also taught me to hold my tongue. To plug my ears.  And to be thankful every day for the sounds that emanate from the upstairs – the barking, foot-stomping, crying or howls of laughter.

That small room that once was Wally’s haven, where he kept his guns, hunting gear, and favorite books is now mine. Where I promptly built a Murphy bed along one wall for guests, where my computer lives and so, where I write these columns. And still where we hang our stockings on Christmas Eve. Yes, even the adults get a stocking these days; my own parents would have been baffled at the idea.

This Christmas, as he has for the past four, Don joined us. Naturally, by now he’s got his own stocking too. Stocking time is a free for all as we each tear into ours. Out come candy canes and lottery tickets, funny socks and Chapsticks. An enormous pomegranate in one boy’s stocking, a rubber chicken in Don’s.

And at the bottom of Ed’s, my son pulled out a PenBayPilot coffee mug, a bow to his new gig.  As of today, I’ll no longer be writing This Week in Lincolnville; watch for it next week with a new byline: Ed O’Brien.

United Christian Church

The UCC will not hold services January 1, and will resume their 9:30 a.m. worship service January 8.

Beach Flood and Power Outages

Here on Beach Road we were only without power from Friday afternoon until morning Saturday, one advantage to living on a main road. The other side of Sleepy Hollow to the Beach and south to Camden never did lose it. But for those on less populated roads it was a much longer haul. The Beach, however, was the place to be at the height of the wind and at high tide, which was 10:27 Friday morning.

Waves were breaking over the seawall with water pouring onto the parking lot at the Pound. Frohock Brook was up to the bottom of the bridge and spilling over into the road. I’m not sure whether the road flooded from the Brook there at the bridge or from the marsh behind.  All in all it was quite a reminder of what rising sea level will mean for the future of Lincolnville Beach.

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