Family Constellations What did mom and dad do to grow old from one moment to the next?
Published April 14, 2018
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As some of you know, I am Colombian and have been living in Madrid for more than 11 years. I have my parents in Colombia, they are already grown up, in fact they have been since I moved here.
Throughout this time, the years have continued to pass for them, and of course, for me, only that in the distance, sometimes we are left with the static picture of that day we decided to migrate; time seems to freeze in our minds, but it is not so.
There have been several occasions in which parents get sick, more and more frequently, fears and anguish appear, the anguish that is experienced in the distance when at dawn you receive a call saying that mom or dad is hospitalized. I am sure that those who, like me, are miles away and have lived a similar experience, resonate with that anguish; the one that sometimes turns into helplessness, to pass through calmness and end in acceptance. At least that is the route I take!
My parents are getting very old, around 90 years old... and as time goes by, new experiences and emotions appear, bringing out in one way or another those fears of losing the hero or heroine of our life. And in the midst of their changes, our fears, our not knowing what to do, how to act, how to manage or accept that life has passed and what was is no longer.
In the midst of this reflection, I share this text that has come to me through one of my brothers, certainly a scenario that sooner or later we have to face, for which we have not been prepared in most cases, and that certainly leads me to approach more and more to the work of grief, my own grief, that loss that becomes evident with the passing of the days.
What did mom and dad do to grow old from one moment to the next?
They got old... Our parents got old. Nobody had prepared us for this.
One fine day they lose their composure, become more vulnerable and acquire some senseless manias.
They are tired of taking care of others and serving as an example; now it is time for them to be cared for and pampered by us.
They have walked many miles and know everything, and what they don't know, they invent.
They no longer make long term plans; now they dedicate themselves to small adventures, such as eating on the sly everything the doctor forbade them to eat. They have spots on their skin. Suddenly they are sad. But they are not out of date: out of date are their children, who refuse to accept the cycle of life.
It is difficult to accept that our heroes and heroines are no longer in control of the situation.
They are fragile and a little forgetful, they have this right, but we continue to demand from them the energy of a turbine. We do not admit their weaknesses, their sadness.
We feel irritated and some of us go so far as to yell at them if they make a mistake with the cell phone or any other electronic device, and on top of that, we have no patience to hear for the thousandth time the same story they tell as if they had just lived it.
Instead of calmly accepting the fact that they adopt a slower pace as the years go by, we simply get irritated for having betrayed our trust, the trust that they would be indestructible like superheroes.
We provoke pointless arguments and get angry with our insistence that everything should go on as it always was.
Our intolerance can only be fear. Fear of losing them, and fear of losing ourselves, fear of also ceasing to be lucid and jovial.
With our anger, we only provoke more sadness to those who one day only tried to give us joy.
Why don't we manage to be a little of what they were for us? How many times these heroes and heroines spent entire nights with us, medicating, caring for and measuring fevers!
Let us do our best for them today, as much as we can, so that tomorrow when they are no more... ...we can remember them fondly, from their smiles of joy and not from the tears of sadness they have shed because of us.
In the end, our heroes of yesterday... ...will be our heroes forever.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
