Seamus Heaney's Poem About His Father Getting Old

Follower by Seamus Heaney

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

Caretaking; Sandra Tsing Loh on When Love and Resentment Collide

Writer Sandra Tsing Loh spoke on NPR about the stress of caring for her aging father, which she also wrote about in the Atlantic.

My parents took cared of me from zero to 18, and I lived with them. I lived under their roof. I did everything they told me to, and then I was out. We may take care of our elderly parents for 20 or 30 years because the longevity is so much longer now. They don't do what we ask them to. They're not under our house. They're not under our holiday schedule, so it's actually in this book that I talked about, Jane Gross' "A Bittersweet Season," in The Atlantic. She talks about the mommy track versus the daughter track. And although parents, we complain about our children and how tough it is to find day care and good schools, et cetera, kind of the daughter track is far more open ended and has no rewards, you know, at the end except for death. And it's longer and it's unpredictable and it's a totally different track people are experiencing now.