It is funny to me that we think we can grow older and not contemplate death. Death, which is all around us, is waiting; greedy and hungry for our sustenance. In our teens we are immortal…nothing can stop us. In our twenties we are reassured that we have a lifetime to live. Our thirties leave us grasping at the strands of our youth that have passed us by and we don’t understand why we can no longer pull them to us. Forties and Fifties I can only imagine, but it seems to me we begin to accept the coming of age…the wrinkles, the aches,…the moment when we realize we must treasure what we have now for soon it too might pass us by…My dad will turn 79 in July…and he is a young 60, but when I look at him it dawns on me…he’s such a strong man…I see him as I did ages ago,…fair skinned and young with no wrinkles upon his brow..when in reality he has grown older when I was not looking…I don’t like it and I refute it and there is nothing I can do about it…I still see him as Superman…and yet he has wrinkles that have never graced his face before and he has his aches and pains that I don’t want to acknowledge. His face is more expressive now than it has ever been, but a part of me still doesn’t want to see the age of it. I will someday lose him and my mother. It is a fact that can not be denied. Yet at the same time I see the lines crawling across my own brow that mark the time I see in them. I don’t ever want to go back to the days when I thought I was immortal, but I don’t want to accept the loss that lies ahead either…What a dilemma…cherish the day that is here or look forward to a day that may never be. I think that we forget to treasure what is and when it is gone we weep for what we have lost, when it is us that let it slip though our fingers as sand slips through the spaces of time. I am going on a trip with my father this weekend and I am going to laugh with him and take pictures of his beginning and love every minute of it because I can, because it is now and I will cherish it because it is time well spent. I love my father.
When faced with our own mortality
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