Watching your parents get older isn’t something you prepare yourself for until it happens. Each day you wake up a day older, but you don’t see that eternal clock ticking away, counting down the time until it is right in front of your face and impossible to ignore.
Growing up, my parents always felt young, and my grandparents felt old. Pretty, typical, I would say. We were an active family, we took vacations to the beach, went camping in the Boundary Waters, chartered sailboats in the Apostle Islands, and my favorite trips were the ones snowboarding in Big Sky, Montana.
As a family, we have navigated many health scares together, including cancer and a few heart surgeries, but we’ve always come out stronger. We dealt with Fritz’s neurological anomalies in stride because, for the most part, these were things we could fix. Cancer would be cut out, a stint put in for a like-new heart and a few MRI’s to show Fritz was healthy. But age, that was something out of my control, and I started to mourn and worry about a loss that wasn’t close to happening yet.
I started to mourn something that is pretty far off because I never pictured my mom and dad getting older until I joined them in parenthood. Suddenly, they were grandparents. I wasn’t 21 anymore, and they weren’t 50. It hit me, like a ton of bricks to the chest, soon they would get older – they were getting older, it felt like time was slipping through my fingers.
My anxiety became crippling; I worried that I would wake up to hundreds of alerts, letting me know something had happened; my body started reacting by reflexively putting my hand on my phone at 3:00 AM. Getting over this is still something I’m working on. I’m thankful to have access to great therapy and modern medicine.
I’ve noticed that since becoming a parent, I’ve become a lot more dependent on my own for their advice, encouragement, camaraderie, and support. That is something I can’t fathom living without. Will one day I wake up and not be able to FaceTime my parents with Fritz over dinner? I can’t cope with that. So, I’m not coping. I’m facing this fear head-on.
I’ve realized it is okay to be scared of losing people you love. To hate thinking of them being sick or in pain, to want to do anything to make them feel better. Facing mortality is a complicated dilemma and one I’m not fully ready to tackle, but one I’m okay with being scared of.
I’m not ready to make peace with mortality.
I think it means I’m human and that I love my mom and dad.
