I love your honesty. It helps us all. Because truthfully, we will all go through this. First we see it in others, then we live it with our parents, then we do it ourselves.

To some extent, our society has tried its best to live a disney version of reality. Death the tragedy, death the unfair, death the "never going to happen." "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The truth is, this life is a one way ticket, a suicide mission, for all of us. Our consciousness links to this physical, mortal reality for only a short period of time because the radio tuner we call our body is organic, temporary, single use, recyclable. And the more it breaks down, the less capable it is of tuning into the greater consciousness that our own individual discrete consciousness emanates from.

We are all fractals of this greater consciousness, unique like snowflakes yet identical like snowflakes and innumerable like snowflakes. We are created, exist for a while, then melt and rejoin the greater pool of water whence we came so that we can be remade into new snowflakes again.

My children want to me live forever. We talk about death and it makes them uncomfortable. They don't want to think about it. And yet, if there is any way to get more out of the process of life, it is for all of us to learn to feel your sense of loss and inevitability before it happens, to savor more of the sweet bitterness of mortality before the end, to do our mourning ahead of time when we can be comforted by hugging those we will miss rather than afterwards when we cannot.

The moral is that the time to miss our family is before they are gone.

Thanks for your post.