The Open-Faced Sandwich Generation

On caregiving, corned beef, and finally getting more of the good stuff

I’ve always loved an open-faced sandwich. My husband insists an open-faced sandwich isn’t technically a sandwich.

"It has to have a top slice of bread. Otherwise, it's not a sandwich," he regularly argues.

To which I reply, “Lettuce is the other piece of bread.”

This debate has been going on for years. He’s a math guy, so he believes in ratios. One slice of cheese. Two slices of lettuce. Three slices of meat. The lightest schmear of mayo… To me, that’s not a sandwich. It’s a cry for help.

I grew up with a mother who packed deli sandwiches that looked like kosher architectural feats. Mile-high, lean corned beef on rye with a jumbo sour pickle on the side. The meat wasn’t something in the middle. It was the show. As a result, I was very popular at lunchtime in the cafeteria during elementary school. I’d regularly trade away half of my fabulous, Katz’s deli-style sandwich, and often net a Three Musketeers bar or a half of a Wonder bread, butter and colored sprinkles sandwich in the bargain.

My mother never knew how I optimized her overstuffed sandwiches. I basically held cafeteria court and almost every day, regardless of whether the main attraction was tuna, roast beef, or pastrami, someone would inevitably come up to barter with me. Unless it was Pizza Friday.

Which brings me to caregiving.

For about five years, my husband and I were deep in the meat of what people call the sandwich generation. The two of us were helping our three adult daughters launch, while simultaneously caring for our four aging parents.

The girls were fairly predictable. Late night calls about money, sucky professors, too much alcohol. The parents, on the other hand… were loose canons. They presented a thousand little emergencies and sometimes all at once. It was crazy-making in the sense that they insisted they didn’t need help, but in fact needed a lot of help, and often more than we could provide.

Add Covid to the mix, which amplified their loneliness and fear even as they continued insisting they were doing just fine.

For my parents in Florida, I arranged for an assortment of services to keep up the facade that everything was okay. I set up an InstaCart account and did weekly grocery deliveries. At first, my mother loved this. It was magical having bags of food show up outside her house perfectly packed. But then she grew weary of it. She didn’t like that the delivery people were different all the time. She didn’t like that she couldn’t pick out her melons. Smell them for ripeness.

“The cherries weren’t sweet, the English muffins were not the diet variety, and the shopper bought the wrong cottage cheese,” she’d complain. I learned how to “chat” in the Instacart app with the shopper, but they were not interested in the details.

Eventually, the difference between 2% and 4% cottage cheese pushed my mother out into the world. She was risking the pandemic and sneaking out to shop on her own. I’m fairly certain these secret missions accounted for several mysterious dents in her new Lexus, which she claims were rocks that hit the car.

My father, whose memories were stuck in the Lower East Side, WWII, and our house on Long Island, would accompany her on these shopping adventures. And by "accompany," it turned out, she meant leaving him in the car with the window down while she shopped. In Boynton Beach, Florida. In the summer. When the police got involved, my mother treated the whole thing like a charming anecdote.

“He likes sitting in the car. And he likes the heat! The police always overreact. They have to. It’s their job!” The queen of denial put us in our place yet again.

At the same time, my husband’s dad was facing his own health crises. There were regular middle-of-the-night calls from his wife.

“He fell again and I can’t pick him up.”

Sudden rashes all over his body. Lengthy hospital stays. More falls.

I made food regularly for my mother-in-law. Which at first was a perfect solution. Until she was too weak to open the fridge or close the microwave and would call frantically for me to get the food closer to her. Or maybe just bring a filet-of-fish sandwich if that wasn’t too much of a hassle.

The time blurred between a cycle of caregiving and gently suggesting aides, nurses, assisted-living facilities, and all the things they didn’t want to hear. So they didn’t.

Then, one by one over the course of three years, in a fairly even succession, all four parents were gone. And suddenly, the sandwich disappeared.

At least the top half of it did.

It was only recently that I realized we were no longer a sandwich generation family and had instead, become an open-faced one. Our daughters were all determined to be independent, despite the grousing over adulting. So the layer beneath began to lose a place on the plate as well. The caregiving that had occupied so much mental and emotional space had vanished almost overnight.

Now, we’re living out the meat of the sandwich. Which, to be frank, is quite nice.

Nobody talks much about this stage. The grief is real. I miss my parents and I miss my in-laws. I especially miss my dad and my mother-in-law. I miss the stories, and even some of the frustrations. But I would be lying if I said I missed being responsible for everyone all the time.

What comes after the Sandwich Generation isn’t selfishness. It's space. Breathing room. Time for your own life again. A chance to move more intentionally. To daydream. Travel. Spontaneity. Creativity. Permission to ask: What do I want now?

Sometimes the answer is as simple as more of the meat, lettuce and sauce, less of the heavy bread.

That’s what this stage of life feels like. To me anyway. A little lighter. A little messier. And piled high with everything you’ve earned.

But for my husband, it will always remain a yummy, two-slices of bread, simple, solid, standard sandwich.

That’s fine. More lean corned beef for me.

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