getting to that age
Sorry in advance for this depressing post, but it's something that I wanted to get on the page as it has been on my mind a lot recently. As usual, I have no solutions, but a lot of love and availability for anyone who wants to talk in circles about life and death.
"We're getting to that age" is a euphemism that I have heard a lot in my social circle over the last few months. It is an indirect way to end conversations about a suspicious lump, an additional screening, a strangely persistent cough. It is also a gentle acknowledgement of a universal truth that we handle in vastly different ways: that parents get old and get sick and eventually die.
Recently I have had essentially the same conversation with five different friends about the deterioration of their parents' health. Most of it is cancer. Most of it is jarringly sudden. But I guess that is how serious illness happens. Rarely do we enjoy the luxury of witnessing a slow physical or mental descent (is it really better to watch your loved ones fade away?), but from my perspective, it seems like life has skipped past the "everyone is getting married" phase and dove straight into the "I need to fly home tomorrow" phase.
For those of us in our late 20s or early 30s, it feels especially unfair. We lost a few crucial years in our early or mid 20s to covid, stunting early adult development, and now have to go from salaried teenagers to caretakers learning to parent our parents. And just like the original version of parenting, it is something that we all handle differently, likely with no right answer. I have friends who drop everything to go home from the beginning and I have others who believe that these situations are good use cases for uber and seamless. I have friends who are mad at themselves for worrying about their social lives while their moms endure chemotherapy, and friends who rage at their dads for smoking a lifetime of cigarettes, leaving their children to clean up their ashes. I don't know where I will land on the spectrum, and I'm not really in a rush to find out. The way I was raised, I watched my mom take 14 hour flights multiple times a year as my grandparents became sicker, arranging for home care and around the clock nursing. I have watched the early signs manifest in my parents too, and it is hard not to imagine how our lives will change in the near future. As my mom puts it, it is pointless to think about things that you cannot and will not be able to change. She recommends living day by day, which is difficult when the voices in my head seem to much prefer the past and future over the present.
But for my friends who are going through this now, I'd like to offer some encouragement (or consolation?). There are a lot of consequential things in life that happen TO us. Meaning, we didn't initiate them and we can't entirely control them and we don't know where they will take us. These often result in good things - meeting lifelong friends and partners, building on career opportunities, experiencing serendipity - that we are able to capitalize on because we were prepared at that time to act as we did, even if we were unaware of it at the time. Sickness and death and loss are similarly things that happen to us. Likewise, we have been preparing for them all of our lives, with or without knowing it. We have been sharing good food, having meaningless blowup fights, holding grudges, celebrating accomplishments, and hiding tears. So even though none of us will ever feel ready to watch our loved ones age, it is inevitably our privilege and burden to let this happen to us before it is our turn. We are as ready as we will ever be, even if that is not at all.