To young people who read this column, I have bad news to tell you. One day will arrive in your existence where you will have to take care of your parents as they took care of you in the first days of your existence, in a request that will not know an end. The day your parents fall ill, when they get into the evening of their lives, among this slow decline that nibbles from the interior, you Find so surprised and helpless that you do not know who to turn to.
If it is sad to age, it is even sadder to see your parents age. They who used to carry you on their shoulders, now they are walking up. They have a slow and heavy speech, struggle to hear what you entrust to them, remain a long time lost in their thoughts. Their world has shrunk. They now live in slow motion, without going or desire, absent from a world that has exhausted all their senses.
Without saying, you contemplate their fall. Secretly, in thoughts that stabs you, you want them to exhibit their weaknesses. How is it possible that those who gave you life have become as fragile, as tired, sometimes so extinct that all life seems to have deserted them? These creeping shadows, so are they the same who raised you, nourished, scolded, bordered, cajolé, encouraged, sermoned, neat? What do they have in common with these beings who, from the top of their forces, watched over your destiny and worried if you ever had to come back? Who took you in their arms and covered you with kisses? Who came when tears were shaking you? Who reassured you and touch your sorrows? Who taught you to cross the street and swim? Who were bleeding at the four veins so that your life looks as much as possible to a fairy tale?
They cracked. Some do not recognize you, others have even forgotten who they were. They are there without being there. Or it is the disease that nails them in bed. They go from hospital rooms to retirement homes like ghosts lost to themselves. You accompany them as best you can but it is never enough. You are their last allies, their unique appeals and this responsibility crushes you as much as it exhausts you. No one warned you that the day will come when children you will become parents of your own parents. It looks like a scam, an absolute scandal. We want to go and file a complaint for false advertising, require a refund, request accounts.
Your heart is bleeding from seeing them so but you can’t help but blame them, do we have an idea of aging like that, have no modesty to be shown in this way, dried up body whose bishop view? And this drool that slides from their lips, these stained clothes, not this hair scattered, could it have the decency to hide them, we who are still in full life?
But their greatest crime is elsewhere. What afflicts us deep in our beings is not so much the spectacle of their decrepitude, but to show us what awaits us. These old men they have become, it is us in a few years. It seems impossible but the mirrors never lie. What we contemplate with a mixture of dread and pity is above all the spectacle of our own forfeiture when, in our turn, we will be returned to our intimate twilight.
They are what we are promised to become, this inexorable who awaits us, the ambush of old age. Whenever we visit them, it is our future that we meet, the dismal of our old days, the specter of death. This vision horrifies us, we would like to chase it from our mind, never to think about it but it is impossible, it is there, inscribed on these familiar faces which look at us without seeing us, speak to us without hearing ourselves, hear us without understanding ourselves.
Aging is what we have left when nothing remains.
