Watching Them Grow Old
The phone call takes a beat longer to make sense now. Your father asks the same question twice; your mother reaches for the railing she used to ignore. Nothing is wrong, exactly — but something has shifted, and you can feel the ground tilting toward a future you're not ready for. You hang up and sit with a low, wordless dread: the people who raised you are getting old, and you can't stop it.
Two thousand years ago, Cicero sat with the same dread. He was in his sixties, freshly grieving, watching Rome and his own body change, and he wrote a small book to steady himself — Cato Maior de Senectute, "On Old Age." He gave the argument to Cato the Elder, an old man cheerfully defending his own season of life. And his aim was gentle: to strip the terror out of aging by looking straight at it.
Cicero's central idea is one worth carrying into that phone call. He argued that old age is not a shipwreck of the person but a different chapter of it — that as the body loosens its grip, the mind, memory, and judgment can hold their own, and that the years are not something done to us so much as lived through, each with its own proper strengths. He held, too, that the surest provisions for a good old age are a life of learning and decency laid up beforehand — the character you build early is the company you keep late. (I'm paraphrasing Cicero's argument rather than quoting a translation, since the crisp English renderings are mostly modern.)
So here is the counsel. The tilt you feel is real, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But Cicero's gift is to reframe what you're watching: not a subtraction, but a passage — a person still fully themselves, meeting a new terrain. Your job isn't to freeze them in the version you remember. It's to accompany them. Ask the questions now, while the answers are rich — about their childhood, their choices, the stories you've never gotten. Handle the practical scaffolding (the railing, the appointments, the papers) with matter-of-fact love, not panic. And let them keep their dignity and their say for as long as they can hold it, because that is what they'd most want kept.
You can't stop the clock. But you can decide to be in the room while it runs.