Frankie, Grace and Me

Frankie, Grace and Me

      Recently, I finished Season three of Frankie and Grace.  This Netflix series is about two friends, Frankie, who is very free-spirited and Grace who is uptight and focused.   These two women, who are in their early 70’s, have been thrown together as housemates by a set of circumstances that include betrayal, divorce and the coming out of the closet by their ex-husbands, who have, for years, been lovers.   The storyline weaves through the complicated lives of Frankie and Grace, their ex-husbands and their children.  The series is laugh-out-loud funny and yet it is often thought provoking and sometimes sad.   Jane Fonda, at age 80, stars as Grace and Lily Tomlin at 78, is Frankie.  These two actresses plus an excellent supporting cast and a strong storyline make the series one of the most popular on Netflix.

      My daughter gave me a Roku and a subscription to Netflix for Christmas.  She suggested I watch Frankie and Grace and once I started, I binged and made my way through 3 seasons in one week.  As I went from episode to episode, I found myself strongly relating to the two women because, like them, I am also in my early 70’s and have lived through crazy, sad and painful experiences.  Often while I was binging on the series, I thought  it should be titled, Frankie, Grace and Me.

     There is an episode in the third season where Frankie and Grace both end up on the floor suffering from intense back pain.  They can’t get up and both are trying to be first to reach the phone by pushing, crawling and rolling over each other.  I found myself laughing so hard that I thought I was going to fall  off the couch.  Then, suddenly, everything changed, Grace was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, upset and crying because she didn’t want to ask for help or need help from her children.  She told Frankie, a mother should be the one helping her children, the children shouldn’t be in a situation where they have to help their mother.

     This part of the aging process is probably difficult for most women but especially for those of us who have been very independent.  I am one of those people who rarely asked for help, but now, after two back surgeries and two shoulder surgeries, I find my life has changed.  I remember the first time I was made aware of this fact and also remember the experience threw me for a loop.  I was shopping at Meijer, obviously  having difficulty reaching an item on a top shelf and  a young woman asked if she could help me.  I stood there processing what had just happened and replied, “I used to be you” meaning, I used to be the person who said, “Can I help”.  It was extremely difficult to say yes, but I did.  From that point on, I’ve found myself increasingly saying yes to offers of assistance and even more significant, when I need assistance, I ask for it.  Each time I’m in this kind of situation, I feel a little piece my independent self slip away.  As I watched Grace sitting there so upset, I knew exactly what she was thinking and it was depressing.

     Last night during the last episode of the 3^rd season, Frankie had a small stroke and found out 10 years prior to this small stroke, she had experienced a more significant one that went by unnoticed.  These two events, the stroke that just occurred and the one in the past, scared her and she felt her world turned upside down.  Frankie found herself facing her own death, it stopped her, changed her, and pulled her down.  She felt weak and was controlled by the thought that she was vulnerable and her life could end without warning.  Frankie no longer could float through life being her hippie, wacky self.  At that moment, Frankie had a choice to make, live a life constantly aware of impending death and being paralyzed by that thought or choose to live a life knowing death would come, it’s inevitable, but feeling hope and the renewed freedom to continue her journey with joy and passion.  With the help of her best friend, Grace, Frankie chose joy, hope and passion.

     The episode ended with Frankie and Grace up in the sky, floating over the ground, carried there by a huge balloon.  They stood in the balloon’s basket, laughing and talking, and looking at the future.  Frankie told Grace that they would solve their problems and deal with life as it hit them and then the background music became, “Who knows where the time goes” and off they went, continuing their journey together.

     I sat on the couch crying, because I know Frankie’s fear, especially when I find myself thinking about our familial predisposition to strokes and heart disease.  I become afraid identifying every headache as a signal for a stroke and every case of heartburn, the beginning of a heart attack.  It’s during this kind of thinking, that I face the reality of death and it scares me.  As I sat there, watching the episode unfold,  I realized that the sequence of events, the stroke and everything related to it was overpowered by the movement of the balloon,  rising up and heading off into the sky. Frankie and Grace had both acknowledged, we don’t know what the future will bring but we can still soar.

     At age 72, I find that I can either continue worrying about how my life will end or put those thoughts away and choose to live life with “gusto”.  Mary Oliver’s poem, I Worried, expresses this choice with great clarity.  We can sit and worry, thinking will this happen or will that happen or we can put those thoughts away and go out in the world and sing.  I want to go through the last years of my life singing, being free to have adventures and “wallowing” in the love of my family.  I want to be like Frankie and Grace and soar, not knowing where life will take me, dealing with unexpected rough weather and hoping for a soft landing with few regrets.

February 9^th, 2018