How A Daughter ‘Bridges’ Generations With Her Dad, The Life Master

There is pin-drop silence in the small room where seven square tables sit in a haphazard arrangement. A sea of white heads—and one black head, mine—hunches over playing cards awkwardly held in arthritic hands, faces fixed in concentration. It’s bridge time at the senior center, and this is serious business.

The silence is occasionally broken by a curmudgeonly old man scolding his partner for a mistake or by the director, whose voice is far larger than her diminutive frame as she presides over her tiny kingdom.

For the past six months, my ninety-three-year-old father and I have come here every week to play bridge.  He is a Life Master, having earned more than five hundred master points in tournament play. I have fewer than one. Of course, he also has the advantage of seventy additional years of experience.

My father has always been brilliant. In the late 1950s, while living in a small village in South India, he wrote a mathematics paper that caught the attention of a world-renowned mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper earned him a full scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. there. 

Like many children of immigrants, I have a complicated relationship with my parents.

I am the youngest of four children. My mother was only seventeen when she had her first child and twenty-four when I was born. She often says that she and I grew up together. Child marriage and early motherhood were common in India at the time, but asking someone barely out of childhood to raise four children often comes at a cost.

Writer Saila Kariat with her parents and brother in 1965 (image source: Saila Kariat)

Beginning in 1959, my parents—and consequently the rest of us—moved repeatedly between India, Canada, and the United States. I attended five different high schools. During the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Canada, South Asians were viewed with curiosity, suspicion, or outright hostility. My eldest brother developed schizophrenia – his tumultuous childhood was possibly a contributing factor. My father, despite being a professor, was never highly paid.

Taken together, these circumstances made stable parenting extraordinarily difficult. Even allowing for all of that, my parents were challenging people.

My father demanded academic excellence. Like him, I also have a Ph.D. (in electrical engineering) —though he occasionally liked to remind me from a less distinguished university.  No matter what we accomplished, it rarely seemed enough. To his credit, my father is a maverick, an independent thinker about many issues, including women’s equality. 

My mother, on the other hand, worried incessantly about conformity—not to the culture we actually lived in, but to the expectations of relatives thousands of miles away in a conservative South Indian village or of the tight-knit South Asian community in the city we happened to be living in. “What will people think?” was the question that governed much of her life.

Caught between cultures, my siblings and I largely had to define our own values, careers, and identities.

Fifty years after my father arrived at Berkeley, my parents moved from the East Coast to California to be closer to my family. Although three of my siblings lived geographically nearer, they believed I would be the one to care for them as they aged.

They were right.

For decades I have managed their housing, finances, healthcare, hospitalizations, and emergencies, largely without help from my siblings. Since childhood I have been told that I am kind, generous, and forgiving. Ironically, those qualities have sometimes felt more like liabilities than virtues.

The last several years have been especially demanding.

My mother has endured two knee replacements, two surgeries for bowel obstructions, pelvic surgery, pneumonia, congestive heart failure, and interstitial lung disease. At eighty-six she remains remarkably resilient and still walks independently.

My father’s diabetes slowly weakened him. He now has a permanent catheter, depends on a walker or wheelchair, and has spent the past three years cycling in and out of hospitals as urinary tract infections repeatedly progressed to sepsis.

Eventually I hired two full-time caregivers, a decision that finally brought some relief.

Even so, I constantly oscillate between compassion for their suffering and exhaustion from the responsibility. Whether it stems from my own deeply ingrained sense of duty or from their demanding personalities, two decades of caregiving have taken an emotional toll.

My own children grew up during these years.

Saila Kariat with her family and parents, in 2004 (image source: Saila Kariat)

Like many members of the “sandwich generation,” I found myself raising children while caring for aging parents. There were many occasions when my parents’ needs took precedence over those of my daughters, both of whom are remarkably patient and accommodating.  I sometimes wonder whether I gave my children enough of myself. Emotional energy is finite, and caregiving consumes it. My children have never complained, but that question lingers, nonetheless.

Over the past decade, I also lost both of my brothers.

My eldest brother died in his fifties after years of living with severe mental illness. My second brother, in whom my mother had placed enormous hopes, died unexpectedly in his sixties.

The greatest grief a parent can endure is the death of a child. My parents endured it twice.

Watching them grieve has forced me to see them differently—not simply as the parents of my childhood but as two elderly people carrying unimaginable loss while confronting their own mortality.

And then there is bridge.

Every game begins the same way. You receive a hand you did not choose. Your success depends not only on your own decisions but on your ability to communicate with your partner. Sometimes you read each other perfectly. Sometimes you don’t. There are brilliant plays, costly mistakes, moments of confidence, moments of doubt, and, always, an element of luck.  The more I play, the more I realize that bridge is an apt metaphor for life.

I began learning the game because I wanted to create one good, shared experience with my father while we still had the chance. Throughout our games he has shown remarkable patience as I struggle toward a level I will almost certainly never reach. At ninety-three, his mind remains astonishingly sharp.

Somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened.  I realized that he trusts me.

For much of my life, I interpreted his feedback as criticism. Now I hear something different: confidence. Faith that I can improve. Faith that I will eventually understand.  It has taken decades to reach this place.

As parents age, they gradually become more like children—dependent, impatient, and often self-absorbed. Eventually you recognize what was impossible to see when you were young: they are simply human beings, flawed and frightened, trying to navigate life with the imperfect hand they were dealt.

The older I become, the more I believe that intentions and outcomes are often separated by circumstance. My parents made mistakes as have I. They were shaped by poverty, immigration, loss, and expectations I can scarcely imagine. I have been shaped by them.

Now, as I help them through the final chapter of their lives, I no longer seek perfect reconciliation. I seek understanding.

Bridge has taught me that you cannot change the hand you are dealt. You can only learn to play it with skill, patience, forgiveness, and grace.  Perhaps that is how we bridge generations—not by erasing the past, but by learning, at last, to become better partners.

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