Reflections on Aging

My talented neighbor, Steven Mosborg, captures reflections better than most…

Ever have one of those flashes of insight that make you wonder how you lived until today without figuring it out before? 

I’ve been having an alarming number of those lately, and I’m chalking it up to my relatively newly achieved well-seasoned age. As said by one of our founding fathers Ben Franklin ““Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.” 

At this point, I’m just grateful that I’ve achieved enough age to begin gleaning a smattering of wisdom, or at least I’ve become old enough to figure a few things out.

This week, I figured out that I share the same age decade with the man to whom I have been married for more than 44 years for exactly one and a half years every decade. And what does that awkward sentence mean? It means that when I finally reached the age of 30, he was still in his 30s for another year and a half. Same with 40, and then 50, and well, you get the idea. 

So this year, it was somehow shocking to realize that we would only share our 70s for another year before one of us moves into the next decade of age.  I mean, it is also somewhat shocking to realize we’re both IN our 70s, but that’s feeling more and more like a gift at this point. 

How did time move so fast? And how do we have fully adult children engaged in their fully adult lives who are nearly absolutely autonomous on their own? 

And that brings up another batch of insights that have been occurring with surprising frequency - those that make me realize that my mom, surprisingly, was right. 

Mom was a complicated woman who left too soon. She was gone before I turned 23, so my memory of “Momisms” goes way back. 

She always said that she couldn’t believe I was in high school because she sometimes felt she was still in her teens. That statement always stopped me for a second, as I looked at her freshly retinted red hair and thought, “Really, Mom?” 

When they drove to North Carolina to drop me off for my first year of college, she was enthralled with the Wake Forest campus. In her earnest and eager way, she was making friends with other parents with the opening line of, “Can you believe our children are old enough for college?” 

It was somewhat horrifying to my 18 year old self, but she got a laugh from other parents, so I didn’t interfere with her efforts. 

And now, here I am surprised that my grown daughter is old enough to go to a professional conference out of state without me, and that my son and his family are old enough to fly across the country to gather with their delightful in-laws. Now it’s me, saying to Jacques, “Can you believe our children are old enough to travel without us?”