Introduction

“The years teach much the days never knew” - Irish Wisdom

 

Getting old isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s cruel, challenging, demeaning, and worst of all, inevitable. As a middle-aged person myself, I have witnessed the shift from feeling invincible to one day realizing that things don’t work as well as they used to. Things hurt that didn’t hurt before. Things crack that never cracked before. We lose sharpness and become forgetful. Sleep, which used to be effortless, has now become elusive. And, it seems, in the blink of an eye, you wake up and say, “Where the hell has my life gone?” 

 

Aging is a difficult thing to admit. We may silently acknowledge to ourselves that we are getting older. However, we continue to plug along in blissful denial because we inherently know that we still have a lot of life ahead of us. The fact that we are getting older and our youth is behind us is something we can push away and enjoy our lives, and more importantly, our freedom.

 

For our aging parents, that freedom has become a distant memory. They live with the realization that they have more days behind them and fewer ahead. The independence they enjoyed for decades has passed.  Each day becomes a struggle, physically and mentally. They can no longer perform the most routine tasks without assistance from someone else. Their everyday responsibilities, which they once took for granted, now require tremendous effort, and for some, these responsibilities may be entirely out of reach. 

 

Even though their bodies might not work the way they once did, their minds are often painfully aware of how things “used to be.” Perhaps the cruelest twist of all is that our parents can still recall, with perfect clarity, the days when they were at the pinnacle of their game. When their bodies did what it was supposed to do, and their brains functioned as designed. 

 

The new reality that our parents face becomes all the more real as they watch their contemporaries pass away. Author Claire Gillman (2019) explains, “Accepting the physical and mental losses and limitations of aging and mortality, particularly if lifelong friends and relations are starting to die around them, is hard to tackle.” The good old days are behind them. They soon find themselves in uncharted territory, saying goodbye to what was and accepting that the end is closer than they would like it to be.

 

There is no standard model for aging and coming to terms with the end of life, as everyone’s experience and processes vary significantly. Of course, there are similarities in the aging process, but everyone’s path is unique. Some parents' bodies still function reasonably well, but their minds do not. For others, their minds are sharp, but their bodies don't cooperate in kind. Then there are those whose neither mind nor body works exceptionally well. Whatever the circumstances, our aging loved ones live with a constant, stark reminder that every beginning has an inevitable end. 

 

The human experience is cyclical. We start our lives as helpless beings, move into adolescence and early adulthood, where we are in complete control. Then, in a cruel twist, the cycle tilts downward, and we find ourselves faced with our own mortality.

 

As a loved one of an aging parent, it is difficult to watch this process happen. We witness many phases of our parents’ lives. We remember our parents as towering, godlike superheroes who seemed all-powerful. We look to them for survival, support, and guidance. They can do no wrong. 

 

As we grow into adulthood, we realize our superheroes are nothing more than fallible and flawed individuals who fell in love and reproduced. Author H. Michael Zal (1992) describes it this way: “How different they look when you take them off the pedestal and see them as human beings with a life story and needs of their own.” We watch the pedestal that we had so purposefully set them on come crashing down. 

 

Over time, we grow up and leave the nest to build our own lives and families. We carry forward the best of what our parents taught us, recreating them as traditions in our own families, and quietly discard the pieces of childhood that no longer serve us. We change the script for our children, aiming to break the patterns that shaped us. Our parents, who had been our sun and moon, now take a backseat to the families that we have created. Although still integral parts of our lives, our focus now shifts to our spouses and children. That is when the change occurs.