Watching Your Parents Get Older and Feeling Time Move

How is it Friday again?

I ask myself this almost every week. Monday arrives with its lists and responsibilities, and then somehow the days fold into one another. Before I have fully registered the week, Friday is back. The weekend passes. Monday returns. Then Friday again.

The calendar does this too. It is August, and I can already feel the holidays approaching. Christmas will be here. Then another year. Then another birthday. I do not say this because I want any of it to slow to a crawl. I love the movement of the seasons. I love the life I am living. But I am increasingly aware of how easy it is to be carried through a life without fully feeling it.

Watching your parents get older has a way of making time visible. A week can disappear quietly, but a change in a parent’s voice can stop you. A birthday can locate you inside your own life. A conversation that begins with the weather can suddenly remind you that nobody you love is standing outside the movement of time.

My dad called me this past weekend.

He had just had surgery. His gallbladder had been removed, and I could hear the fatigue in his voice. There was something else there too, something I could sense before I understood it. We spent the first part of the call talking about ordinary things. How he was feeling. The weather. The time difference between Las Vegas and where I live in Mexico.

Then the conversation drifted toward birthdays.

“And Now I’m the Old Person”

One of my cousins is turning 50. Another cousin had just turned 50. I told my dad that I will be 40 next year.

Something in him shifted.

He paused and said that a few years ago, it was Mama Pam, Grandma Minding, and Grandpa Ingyong who were the old people. Those were my grandparents. They had occupied that place in the family, the place reserved for the elders, the people who seemed to stand farthest ahead of us in time.

Then he said, “And now I’m the old person.”

I could hear the heaviness in his voice. It was not only about a number. He was realizing that his generation had moved into the place where his parents’ generation once stood. The people who had been old when he was younger were gone, and now he was looking at the family from their position.

“It’s all going by so fast,” he said. “Life is so fast.”

His words landed in my body before I had a response. There are truths we understand intellectually for years, but they do not become real until something gives them weight. We know our parents will age. We know we are aging too. We know every life ends. Then someone we love says one honest sentence, and the knowing moves from the head into the chest, throat, belly, or breath.

I think I had carried a story that my dad was only now, in his 70s, beginning to understand how quickly life moves. Maybe I imagined that the urgency of time belonged to his decade of life, not mine.

But I am almost 40, and I already feel it.

His sentence brought me into contact with two versions of him at once. There was my dad as I have known him, and there was this older man hearing the speed of his own life. Perhaps there was also a younger version of me listening, a part that still expected my father to remain in the same place forever.

That younger part does not care that aging is natural. It does not organize the experience into a reasonable philosophy. It only knows that something familiar is changing.

When a parent begins to look, move, or sound older, the relationship can change inside us before anything has changed between us. We may feel more protective. We may become impatient and not understand why. We may want to move closer, or we may want to avoid the entire subject. The body can respond to the possibility of loss long before the conscious mind is ready to call it grief.

I want to be careful with that word. My dad had surgery, but this conversation was not an announcement that he was dying. Growing older is not the same as being at the end of life. Still, aging can open a kind of grief that has no funeral, no ceremony, and no clear beginning.

It may arrive in the silence after your father calls himself old.

Seven Years in a Breath

The date of this conversation carried its own weight. August 17 marked seven years since I moved from the Bay Area to Mexico.

Seven years.

Jerry and I had also just celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. We have now lived in Mexico for most of our relationship. Most of my 30s have happened here. The life that once felt new has become home, history, marriage, seasons, and memory.

I can hold those seven years in a sentence. My body knows they were not a sentence. They were thousands of mornings, ordinary meals, decisions, conversations, changes, celebrations, fears, and returns. A life becomes compressed when we look backward. All that living gathers into a handful of images, and we say, “That went fast.”

I wanted to understand why a conversation about birthdays felt so much like grief. Research offers a name that may fit part of the experience. In a study of adult children whose aging parents were still healthy and independent, researchers described anticipatory loss as a combination of worry, sadness, and gratitude. Awareness of a future loss sometimes encouraged adult children to move toward greater connection with their parents and siblings. The study on anticipatory loss in adult children does not tell us what we should feel. It simply makes room for the strange experience of missing someone who is still here.

Worry, sadness, and gratitude. I recognize how those can live together.

You can be grateful your father called and sad about what you heard in his voice. You can feel relieved that a surgery is over and frightened by the reminder that his body is changing. You can love the life you have built far away and feel the distance between Mexico and Las Vegas differently when a parent is recovering.

Some family relationships hold other truths. A parent may have been inconsistent, unsafe, absent, or unable to offer the care you needed. Their aging may awaken tenderness, but it may also bring anger, numbness, obligation, or relief. You may grieve the parent you are losing, or the parent you never had. You may not want more contact at all.

There is no morally correct feeling to perform. Aging does not erase the history of a relationship. You do not have to abandon your boundaries because time is passing.

In my work with men, I have learned that grief is not always recognizable as grief. It can hide inside urgency. It can look like fixing, researching, staying busy, becoming irritable, or focusing on everyone else’s needs. Numbness can also be grief’s companion. Sometimes the system reduces feeling because feeling everything at once would be too much.

These responses make sense. Many men learned that usefulness was safer than vulnerability. When something cannot be repaired, solved, or controlled, staying in motion can feel like the only available response. The body is not failing when it protects us from a feeling we do not yet have the capacity to hold.

But protection can become so practiced that we miss the person who is still here.

The experience of time itself is more complicated than a calendar suggests. A 2025 brain-imaging study found that older adults showed fewer and longer-lasting neural states while watching a film. The researchers proposed that age-related changes in how the brain marks distinct events may contribute to why time can feel as though it is moving faster, although the study does not offer one complete explanation. The research on neural states and aging points toward something many of us already sense: the way we register experience helps shape the way we remember time.

I do not need neuroscience to tell me that years feel shorter when I live them as a blur. I know what happens when my attention is always reaching toward the next responsibility. The body may be sitting at breakfast while the mind is already at the afternoon meeting. I can be in one conversation while preparing for the next. I can reach Friday without remembering how the week felt.

This is not because I do not care about my life. Often, it is because I care about so many things that my attention is pulled toward all of them at once.

The cost is subtle. Life starts to feel like something happening just ahead of me.

Before Friday Comes Again

When I recorded the original Living Letter about my dad’s call, I tried to slow down enough to feel the moment I was actually in.

I could feel my body in the chair. My feet were on the ground. I noticed the subtle vibration of my voice as I spoke. There was air in the room and quiet movement around me. Nothing extraordinary was happening.

And that was the point.

This is the life I keep waiting for.

Not the life that begins when the work is finished. Not the life that arrives when everyone I love is safe and nobody is aging. Not the life I will finally inhabit once I have more time. This one. The one happening while my feet meet the floor.

Maybe you can notice what is holding you right now. The chair underneath you. The floor beneath your feet. The movement of one breath without needing to deepen it. You do not have to turn this into an exercise or make yourself calm. Just let your body register one piece of the moment.

And if someone you love comes to mind, notice what happens. Maybe there is warmth. Maybe your throat tightens. Maybe you want to call them. Maybe you feel nothing clear enough to name.

Let that be enough for now.

Presence does not require us to flood ourselves with every feeling we have avoided. It is not a demand to repair every relationship before it is too late. It is the practice of making contact with what is here, then returning to what supports us. A little truth. A little ground. A little more room to choose.

From that place, a next step may become visible. You might call your parent. You might listen to a familiar story with less urgency to move the conversation along. You might ask about the person they were before they became your parent. You might make plans to visit. Or you might bring the grief of a complicated relationship to someone who can help you hold it without asking you to reconcile.

Slowing down is not the same as stopping your life. It does not require you to move somewhere quiet, leave your work, or become a different kind of person. I think of it as allowing the body to participate in the life the mind is already managing.

That is part of what I mean when I talk about somatic coaching for men. We are not trying to defeat time or eliminate grief. We are building enough capacity to stay in relationship with ourselves while something true is happening.

My dad called after surgery. We talked about the weather, the distance between us, and people turning 50. Then he told me that he had become the old person.

I cannot change that for him. I cannot keep myself from becoming the old person one day. I cannot hold the people I love in place.

It will be Friday again. Christmas will come again. There will be another birthday, and then another, until one day there is not.

I do not want that truth to rush me. I want it to bring me closer.

Closer to the chair beneath me. Closer to the person on the phone. Closer to the life that is moving, even now, through my hands.

If time, aging, or grief has been pulling you into urgency, numbness, or shutdown, you are invited to explore somatic coaching for men. We can slow down together and listen for what your body has been carrying. There is no need to force an answer. We can begin with what is already here, before Friday comes again.