There’s a moment that comes to everyone eventually. You’re watching your father struggle with the television remote, squinting at buttons that used to make perfect sense. His fingers, once steady enough to tie fishing knots in the dark, now shake slightly as he searches for the power button. For just a moment, you don’t see your father. You see a seventy-three-year-old man whose body is starting to betray him in small ways.
The realization hits without warning: someday he won’t be here. Not in some distant future, but maybe sooner than anyone wants to admit. He won’t be here to get frustrated with technology, to tell the same stories about your childhood, to call and ask if you’re eating properly. Your own death feels abstract and far away. His feels immediate and unbearably real.
There’s strange mathematics in love. We fear losing the people we need more than we fear losing ourselves. It might be because we’ve never existed without our parents. Even after moving out, getting married, building our own lives, they remain the foundation beneath everything. They’re the only people who knew us before we became whoever we’re pretending to be. They loved us before we’d accomplished anything worth loving.
She calls while you’re making dinner, her voice slightly breathless. “I walked up the stairs too fast,” she says, laughing at herself. But you hear something else in that breathlessness. Her lungs working harder than they used to. Her body not cooperating quite as easily as before. You remember when she seemed invincible, carrying you, your sibling, and three bags of groceries up two flights of stairs without breathing hard. Now you worry about her walking too quickly up steps.
The cruel part is that parents are often less afraid of their own deaths than their children are. A father mentions updating his will with the same casual tone he uses to discuss weekend plans. A mother talks about what should be done with her jewelry like she’s discussing seasonal storage. They’ve moved death from “someday” to “eventually” while their children are still treating it as an impossibility that can be prevented through sheer denial.
But it’s not just about losing them. When you imagine your own death, you imagine nothing. An absence. When you imagine their deaths, you imagine yourself still here, trying to exist in a world where the people who understood you best no longer exist. Your own death ends your story. Their deaths change your story forever.
Parents aren’t just people we love. They prove we came from somewhere. Our existence has roots deeper than our own memory. Without them, we become the oldest generation in our family line. We become responsible for remembering stories we might not have listened to carefully enough.
A man named Marcus lost his mother two years ago. He says, “I keep wanting to call her. Not for anything important. Just to tell her small things. A funny thing my daughter said. A good meal I had. She was my witness. The person who cared about the boring details of my life just because it was my life.” That’s what people fear losing. Not just their parents, but the version of themselves that exists in their parents’ eyes.
Parents see their children as people who will always be their babies, no matter how old they get, how successful they become, how many mistakes they make. They look at you and see your first steps, your first words, every version of yourself you’ve ever been. When they’re gone, that kind of love goes with them. Others will love you, but never again with that particular combination of unconditional acceptance and complete knowledge of your history.
Maybe that’s why their death frightens us more than our own. We can imagine not existing. But we struggle to imagine existing in a world where we were never anyone’s child. The fear isn’t just about death. It’s about losing the only people who remember when we believed in magic, who know why we’re afraid of thunderstorms, who can tell embarrassing stories about our first day of school because they were there, worrying from the other side of the classroom door.
The television finally turns on. A father settles back in his chair, satisfied. For now, he’s still here. Still someone’s father. Still the person whose existence proves his child belongs somewhere in this world. His child doesn’t tell him about the fear. Instead, they sit beside him and pretend to watch whatever show he’s chosen, feeling grateful for this ordinary moment that won’t last forever but is happening right now.
This fear probably never completely goes away. But maybe it can transform into something else. Maybe it can turn from paralyzing anxiety into deep appreciation. Each phone call becomes more precious. Each shared meal becomes a gift. Each story they tell becomes part of what we’ll carry forward when they’re gone.
This fear, as painful as it is, proves something beautiful. Someone loved us so completely that losing them seems unbearable. In a world that often feels cold and disconnected, that matters. Parents give us something irreplaceable: the knowledge that we deserve unconditional love. When they’re gone, that knowledge doesn’t disappear. It becomes part of who we are. Something we can pass on to others who need to know they matter.
The fear remains. But alongside it grows something else. Gratitude for having been someone’s whole world, if only for a while. Gratitude for ordinary moments with television remotes. Gratitude for breathless phone calls about nothing important. Gratitude for people who love us not because of what we’ve accomplished, but simply because we exist.
When we look at aging parents, yes, we see their mortality. But we also see every bedtime story, every time they believed in us when we didn’t believe in ourselves. That doesn’t end when they do. That stays. That becomes the foundation we stand on when they’re no longer here to hold us up.
The fear of losing them teaches us something important: to stop waiting for the right moment to appreciate them. This moment, right here, with bad television and shaking hands and breathless stairs, this is the right moment. This has always been the right moment.