Our Aging Parents
It happens before most of us expect and for some, it hits us like a freight train
It happens before most of us expect and for some, it hits us like a freight train. A freight train we did not hear or see coming despite it being an obvious part of life. There are signs along the way, some subtle, some not subtle at all that we are all aging. But weirdly, it doesn’t ever feel like we age at the same rate as we see others. At least that is the case for me. I see the visual cues, the undeniable indicators of age progression, in myself and my parents, but yet it still does not feel that we are the age that we are.
For me, the first big shift was in 2009 when my maternal grandfather passed away just shy of his 94th birthday. He was the bedrock of our family, my hero, and mentor, and to lose him signaled that my mother and her siblings were now the eldest generation on that side of the family. I viewed these generations as layers of an onion, a protective and important layer that had peeled away. I still had my paternal grandparents up until 2018 and 2020, when they passed away at the age of 98. They were the last of that protective layer, shielding me and my parents from our eventual mortality.
My grandparents lived very long and healthy lives, setting the benchmark in my mind that if we were lucky, me and my…
