My Mother Is Still Alive

Guest Column by Judith Seid

Getting old means something different to those of us whose parents are still alive.

One of the things it means is that we don’t have the luxury of actually being old ourselves.  We don’t get to do what we want to do when we want to do it.  We have responsibilities and anxieties and sadness.  And continual loss, not just the one-time death-of-a-parent loss.  We have the progressive loss of the parent we once knew, of a person we once liked, of someone who cared for us rather than vice versa.  And we have the loss of our own time.  (Just because we don’t resent it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a loss.)

The other thing it means is that we are continually faced with the possibilities of what it will mean when we are old-old, really old, ancient. It reminds us that aging is a continual loss, too. We lose our fertility, our strength, our mobility, our indepen-dence, our memory, and, if we live long enough, all our friends. Having an old-old parent makes us consider how long we want to live, if we want to accept all these losses, or just lose our lives.

Those whose parents have died have a certain freedom.  I don’t mean to say there isn’t sadness and loss when a parent dies. But there’s an expanding freedom, a moment between the loss of one’s own time and the losses of one’s own aging. My ancient mother will probably live another few years, maybe even eight or ten. We’re a long-lived family. That means that by the time I have freedom from responsibilities, I’ll be 80. My moment might be pretty short.

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Judith Seid is the author of God-Optional Judaism, among other works, and a secular rabbi ordained by the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism.