Many of my friends and contemporaries today are caring for their parents, or worrying about having someone else care for their parents, or worrying about how they will pay for someone else to care for their parents.

As fate would have it, these are concerns I do not share.

My entire adult life has passed without my mother, who died when I was a teenager, and more than half of my adult life has passed since my father died.

In their absence, time has smoothed the rough edges of their faults and perhaps exaggerated the merits of their strengths.

I have spent more time missing them, and wishing they were part of my life, than I have in resentment toward my father for the very human mistakes he made.

I wonder then, what it would be like if they were still alive today?

What would it be like to be faced with the difficulties inherent in attending to the needs of parents no longer able to take care of themselves?

Would I be overwrought with emotion at their decline, or perhaps overcome with resentment at their potential meanness, a nastiness born of their fear at their demise and lack of freedom?

I’d like to think that the same passage of years that has blurred unhappy memories and accentuated pleasant ones would likewise have softened any lingering child-parent antagonism, and that I would be grateful for the ability to care for them as they had once done the best they could to care for me.

That is what I’d like to think.

Update:  February 16, 2015:  photo added; reference to my parents modified