Sunsets Of Our Lives

Our family has been experiencing the sunset of our matriarch's life this past year or so.
When I noticed tonight's sunset as I was considering the election
that I have described in the next blog posting after this one;
I realized that it was the last light of the day, and represented to me the feelings
that we have when we are about to lose our parents.

A friend had just called me to express his feelings about my Mother who is in the hospital,
and he described the plight of his and his wife who had lost her Father just
last week after a short illness, and I think about ninety years. I knew him, and he had a
terrific life and family. My friend of fifty years had also lost his Father recently and I knew him, as well. What a huge man in life he was for his family and for our contemporaries in Truro.
I began to realize that we are at a place in our lives where we have to
take stock of all we are blessed with in our time.
I am so sorry for their loss, and certainly for the loss that my family is contemplating as my
Mother, Edith, lies in hospital, dying a slow and painful, cancer death.

As I looked at the sunset I associated it with these passings above, and the many others
we have all experienced. The beauty of the sunset is awesome, as awesome as the lives our parents live, and the ones they facilitated for us.

I know nearly all of us have good reason to love our parents, and as they pass, I hope we all
spend as much time understanding them and helping them through
this terrifying time of their lives.

Our parents getting old is part of their life. It is a part that often needs support, love and a commitment of our time. Time seems of short supply for many of us.
I have found that the best investment of time I have ever made has been this period of three years back in Canada; and at now at the end, several intense weeks. I have spent them with my Mother and with Lynnda. I suspect that if any of us makes the effort to spend any spare time with our parents in the sunset of their lives, the payback will amaze us.

I don't know how to say it, but I have had the opportunity to get to know about twenty
of Mother's friends who all live in the same assisted living facility with her. It
is amazing to get to know these folks, and learn about their lives. They
have had awesome experiences... I am so sorry that I spent
most of my life not paying attention to the older folks that were almost always around
but seemed to be distant.

They are anything but distant! While they seem to need our help, it is amazing how
much help they can be... to our spirit, to our knowledge and understanding of life and so on.
We seem to think that because they are old, not hip to our sophisticated
new-world ideas, they are passe... I think not...
I have learned that they have soooo much to give, if we open ourselves to them.

This little posting is in hope that you will take the time to learn about your parents and their friends. Their experiences might help us through our realities.

It has happened for me.

When I see the relationship of my friend and his wife to their parents who were and are late in their lives, it reminds me of how lucky Lynnda and I have been to come back and
spend time with Edith, my Mother.