Our Aging Parents, the Unwinnable Battle with Time.

Watching Our Parents Age, the truth about time.

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There’s a sobering truth about getting older: it’s not just you who ages. It’s your parents too.

Time is a funny thing after all.

At first you think a year is a long time, ten years—why, that is forever away.

Retirement? That is a lifetime from now!

But it goes by oh so fast.

You grow up before you know it, a blink of an eye in retrospect, but it didn’t come soon enough for some of us.

We wasted those precious years just like the generations before us. We are all in such a hurry to become adults and run our own lives.

Then we had families of our own, and we celebrated everything time was bringing us. Career, children, first steps, first birthdays, first days of school.

Somewhere around seeing our children turn into adults and holding that first grandchild, it starts to really set in.

Where has the time gone?

Our view changes, our perspective starts to shift, and time racing by seems less of a celebration and more of something to hold onto.

Of course, we are not on this journey alone.

We see the effects of this slow relentless enemy—the battle scars of time—on the faces of our colleagues, our friends, our family, and of course on our parents.

It is a war of attrition. Attrition of the minutes and hours of our lives. A war that time always wins.

At 87 each, my parents are showing the signs more quickly now. The changes don’t creep in—they lurch forward, sometimes month by month, sometimes week by week.

(My mom is six days older than my dad, so for those six days each year he calls her a cradle robber. She complains, “Since 1958 when we got married, you’ve been saying the same thing, Glen.” He replies, “Patty, I think you’d be used to it by now.”) and so it goes year after year.

But I see the signs more and more clearly. One day it’s just a little more forgetfulness, a little less balance, and then suddenly you see the years all at once.

It’s hard to describe what that does inside you.

These are the people who once seemed unshakable—the ones who worked, who fixed things, who set the rules and carried the weight.

And now you see the weight carrying them.

I find myself wanting to hold onto every little moment—the casual conversations, the stories I’ve already heard a hundred times, even the complaints—because I know the clock is ticking faster.

The hardest part isn’t helping with the practical things—driving, doctors, medications, bills. It’s looking across the table and seeing time winning a battle they can’t fight.

And yet, there’s a strange gift in it. You learn patience. You learn perspective.

You realize that everything they sacrificed, every scar they carried, every choice they made—that’s the reason you’re here.

Their aging reminds you of your own trajectory, and the responsibility to live your years fully.

Out of all of the things you can make more of, time isn’t one of them.

I’ve come to see it as part of the cycle. Just like they once steadied me on a bike, or picked me up when I fell, now I steady them.

It doesn’t make it easier, but it does make it meaningful.

I have always felt so sad for my friends whose parents have already passed. I see the change it makes in them, a void that now exists, filled only with memories. I see a sadness that maybe fades over the years but never vanishes.

It makes it all so real and clear, that it is a season we will all have to face—and can never really be ready for.

Because watching our parents age is watching life’s hardest truth in real time: nothing lasts forever.

Even memories are fragile, only a generation away from being lost.

We can’t stop the seasons, but we can choose how to live in them—spending our time with those who matter most and holding close to the belief that while time slips away, love does not.

This is another entry in Getting Older: Field Notes. 

Because aging isn’t just about us—it’s about the ones who walked before us, and the ones who will walk after.

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Because no matter what season of life we’re in, the journey is always better when we share it.