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LOVED ONES SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA • ILLNESS IN PARENTS • LOSS OF RESPECT FOR PARENTS

When we are children, our parents are gods. They seem unimaginably strong and unfathomably knowledgeable. We find it almost impossible to believe that we will one day be just like them. In some senses, the process of growing up is all about undermining that initial awe. Eventually, we learn that our parents are just people, and that it’s not actually that hard for us to become people, too.

     The sad thing, though, is that our growing up is not the end of the process. There is a symmetry to human life. Just as we learn how easy, how natural, it is for us to be strong and competent and proud, our parents are discovering quite how difficult it can be to remain that way, until the day finally comes when the roles are reversed and the people we idolized more than anyone else become a burden. Suddenly, we are the adults, and our parents are stumbling behind us like children.

      It can be very upsetting to watch someone we admire become diminished; and yet this is a trial we all face, unless we are unlucky enough to lose our parents young. Our mothers and fathers dealt with the same terrible distress before us and we should remember that in time our children will, too. There is no remedy for this pain, except the knowledge that it is better than the alternative, which is never to have had our parents at all or to have lost them young. They were there for us when we were helpless; we should take pleasure now in being able to return the favor.

Our lives are cyclical, and are meant to be: just as we grow, so we must shrink. There is no such thing in life, or in human beings themselves, as permanence. Frankly, we might get rather bored if there were.

The Poetry Remedy Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind & Soul – William Sieghart