i'm terrified of what getting older means for the people around me

a quick note on my birthday as the good ol' days change

I’m turning 28 today, and between the feelings of excitement and happiness is also an anxiety to make the most of it.

I wouldn’t say I don’t value and cherish life. I live it very radically, soaking up each moment with others and never taking it for granted. Yet it feels like not enough, and it makes me sad.

Many friends this year lost their fathers. It was a weird experience, seeing my social media feed not just dotted with complaints about gender discourse or politics or memes, but also of people talking about deep tragedy they were going through.

I may have gone through it with friends, but I don’t know yet what it’s like to lose a parent. What it would mean to relinquish and say goodbye to a love that’s shaped you more greatly, for better or for worse, than any peer. Whether prematurely or when they go surrounded by loving grandchildren and such, death of my parents scares me.

The first post I read on the Internet today was about a 62 year old woman taking care of her stubborn, aging parents. Her dad insisted on going outside in freezing temperatures and having daily chocolate shakes with his whiskey. When he fell and had some brain bleeding after refusing to take care of himself or go to an eldercare home, she had to be the one to take care of everything, even as her own tired spirit was shaking.

Mind you, my father isn’t exactly like this. He’s a much more mild, cheerful man. But it was still scary to hear about, and to picture the vestiges of his stubbornness eventually doing him in. My mother grew up worrying about everyone’s health, and I see now I am my mother’s daughter. I’ve always taken meticulous care of my body and immune system, even as it’s cost me in other ways with mental health. I can safely say though that I usually tend to go 2-3 year stretches without getting a fever or even a sore throat, but in turn I worry about the health of others. Reading about cancer and things like that scares me. It reminds me that I can intellectualize so much, but how much could I withstand disease and tragedy like this?

This weekend I’m going back home for the first time since I moved to New York, and my heart lurches at how far I live now. I feel so guilty about it, even though I know it is New York that can make me happy. Yet because I live so far now, I won’t be able to go back as often anymore. Thus, each time I go back is one more time where my parents have aged. Each birthday I have is the one age older that my parents will turn too.

I’m not so concerned about myself getting older; my health has always been stellar, and my spirit youthful. I don’t know how I’ll cope when my parents go someday though. It terrifies me to think about the responsibilities of caring for their needs as they age, which hasn’t begun yet, but is something that haunts me. If things from the past can choke people, it’s these things from the future that make me sometimes so scared I freeze.

It’s times like these that I’m grateful my sister is a nurse, and we have a great relationship where we critically examine our people pleasing tendencies and our ways of interfacing with our parents. I know if push came to shove I could yell at my parents making dumb decisions in their old age; I just need to keep myself educated. I also know I’ve worked through a lot of grief as I grew up from how I was parented, but truth is that everyone goes through that in some way or another. I don’t know what I’m going to do once it’s actual physical grief, because they’re gone or I’m losing any good days we did have together.

This is something I don’t have an answer to yet. I don’t know how to handle being taunted by the inevitable way loss will feel around me, thick like a blanket, as I’m anxious about it even now. When death was big on my mind as a kid, I could run to my mommy for comfort. But now I can’t really bring up this existential dread without being scoffed at.

I’m not sure how people comfort each other about the mortality of others. My own death isn’t that scary to me, but the loss of people before me, especially my family, will inevitably hurt.

This is a rather morbid birthday thought, so I will go and try to make myself happy on my 28th birthday today now. Bookmarking this for a later reflection that doesn’t end on a “ugh I feel bad about this” note.