Friday, January 9, 2015

They Are Not My Parent or Grandparent


There comes a time in ones life when you began to care for your aging parents and grand parents that a troubling fact is revealed.  As you once again find yourself living intimately involved in their lives you realize you do not know them nearly as well as you once thought.  The greater part of their lives, that beyond the 18 years you spent with them (probably conscious of several fewer than that) is as great a mystery to you as a common stranger on the street.  Their fears and phobias, their great loves and great awareness’s, the real person who is not your parent or your grand parent but a person wholly removed from those roles.  You begin to realize that being your parent or grandparent was a role they played but was never who they were.  They are a person with a life lived.  It is the continued discovery of that life over the last few years that breaks my heart at how unique they are and how I was always selfishly unaware of them outside of their relation to me. 


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