As ageing parents need more care, adult children struggle to balance work, family and time. A heartfelt reflection on love, duty and growing old together.
THERE is a particular kind of heartbreak that comes with watching your parents grow old. It is a sadness you cannot quite explain to anyone who has not experienced it.
It creeps up on you in the most ordinary moments, until one day you realise that the people who once made you feel safe in this world are slowly becoming people you need to protect.
And the hardest part? You cannot stop it.
I look at Appa sometimes and struggle to reconcile the man he was with the man he is today. Appa was once the strong, towering figure who held our family together. The kind of man you believed could handle anything life threw at him. He was our pillar, our security, the person who made you feel that no matter how difficult things got, somehow, everything would be all right.
Today, Appa lives with partial dementia and has had his left leg amputated. He depends on his children to accompany him for hospital check-ups and help him with things he once managed on his own.
There is a sadness in watching your father lose pieces of his independence, one by one. You want to do everything you can for him but there is a part of you that wishes he did not have to need so much help in the first place.
You wish you could turn back time, even for a little while, just to see him as he once was.
Then there is Amma. Amma was an independent woman who worked at an international bank and somehow managed to keep an entire household running. Bills, school activities, homework, family matters and all the little things that needed remembering – she carried them all, often without making a fuss.
Looking back, I wonder how she did it all. Mothers of her generation had a way of making the impossible look ordinary. They did not announce how much they were doing, they simply did it. They made sure the children were taken care of, the house was in order and life carried on, even when they were tired.
Today, Amma has knee problems and life is no longer as easy for her as it once was. She and Appa live on their own, waiting for their children to visit, to help with whatever they need or simply to spend some time with them. And that is what hurts the most. The waiting.
In Indian families like ours, our parents were brought up to be strong. They learnt to swallow their worries, put on a brave face and keep going because there was a family depending on them. They did not always have the luxury of falling apart. There were children to feed, bills to pay and futures to secure.
Even now, I sometimes wonder how readily they would tell us if they were struggling. Would they ask for help or would they quietly manage as best they could because they know we have our own families, our own children and our own responsibilities?
Would they tell us they are lonely or would they simply say everything is fine?
Perhaps they do not want to trouble us. Perhaps they know how busy our lives have become. Perhaps, after spending decades putting everyone else first, asking their children to stop and make time for them feels like asking for too much.
That thought breaks my heart. Because these are the same people who spent their time, money, energy and love making sure we had what we needed. They gave us opportunities, looked after us when we were helpless and put our needs ahead of their own so many times that we probably grew up believing it was simply what parents did.
We never had to wonder whether there would be someone to look after us when we were sick, whether someone would remember our school activities or whether there would be food on the table. They made sure of it.
Now, we are the adults. We have jobs to keep, bills to pay, children to raise and households of our own to manage. We are trying to give our children the same security our parents gave us. We are doing what they once did, carrying our own responsibilities and trying to make life work.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, our parents are growing older. We tell ourselves we will visit when work settles down. We will spend more time with them after this busy period. We will take them out, sit with them longer and make up for the days we could not be there. But life rarely slows down long enough for us to feel ready.
There is always something waiting to be done. And while we are busy trying to build a life for our children, the people who built our lives are quietly moving into a stage where they need us more than ever.
It is a cruel irony. They spent their best years giving us everything they could. Now, when they could use a little more of our time, we sometimes find ourselves struggling to give it to them. Not because we do not love them. God knows we do.
But love and time are not always the same thing. We can love our parents with all our hearts and still be absent on days they need us. We can worry about them every day and still go weeks without sitting down with them for a proper conversation.
And sometimes, I think, that is the guilt adulthood leaves us with. We know they are getting older. We see the changes. We notice the slower movements, the growing dependence and the things they can no longer do as easily as before. Yet, we carry on with our routines because life demands it.
Until a hospital appointment, an unexpected phone call or a moment of realisation reminds us that time is not waiting for us to become less busy.
I wish we could give our parents the same things they gave us so freely. Not just financial support or help with appointments but also the feeling of being cared for without having to ask – the comfort of knowing someone will show up. The reassurance that they are not a burden. Because they should never have to feel that way.
I do not know how to make peace with the fact that Appa and Amma are ageing. I do not know how to watch the people who once seemed invincible become more vulnerable without wishing, somewhere deep inside, that I could do something to change it.
Perhaps this is what growing up really means. We spend our childhood believing our parents will always be there to catch us. Then we become adults and slowly realise that one day, we must be the ones to catch them. And perhaps the saddest part is that no matter how much we do for them, we will never quite feel that we have done enough to repay everything they have given us.
We cannot return the years they spent raising us. We cannot repay every sacrifice or give them back the strength of their younger days. But we can show up. We can call. We can visit. We can sit beside them without looking at the clock. We can listen to their stories, even when we have heard them before and make them feel that they still matter in the middle of our busy lives.
Because one day, there may be no more hospital appointments to accompany them to, no more calls to return and no more visits to postpone.
And the time we kept promising ourselves we would make for them will become the time we wish we had.
One day, we become our parents’ grown-ups. I just wish we could keep them young a little longer.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the news editor at theSun.
Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
