Quotes & Sayings About Aging Parents

I now urge friends and acquaintances to have conversations with their aging parents and within their families while their parents are still relatively healthy and of sound mind. — Lisa J. Shultz

Most people think that aging is genetic and yet if your parents lived to age 80+ that will add three years to your life. — Deepak Chopra

Schoolmasters and parents exist to be grown out of. — John Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.
Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver — Peggi Speers

The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain. — Elizabeth Hay

Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts. — Louise Erdrich

Those who lament the dissolution of the American family-kids with no way to get to Girl Scouts, aging parents put into nursing homes-should remember what it was that kept the American family together: women's blood. — Joan Acocella

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry. — Lorin Stein

That's what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud. — Christopher Bollen

I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible. — Tia Walker

They rarely look at Baba
the teenagers
and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him. — Khaled Hosseini

What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of. — Jill McCorkle

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt ... The emotionally satisfying discussions that take place in Chronic Pain Outreach and Depression Resources are simply updated versions of the grandmotherly practice of hanging crepe. We could eliminate much of the isolation that support groups exist to fill and save the "traditional family" that everybody is so worried about if more couples took their aging parents to live with them. — Florence King

For women of my generation, it was the 'juggling act.' Jobs, marriage, children, homes, and aging parents were the balls we added, tossing them in the air as our lives filled up and praying they wouldn't come crashing down on our heads. — Willow Bay

Someone said that thirty was a significant birthday, and everyone around the table agreed. Someone else said it was the first time you heard the bell.
What bell? someone asked.
But they all knew what bell. It was like you'd already completed a few laps, observed another, but this was the first time you'd properly heard the bell. There had been one at seven, but you hadn't heard it because you were so young; and then one at fourteen but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy looking over your shoulder; then another at twenty-one but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy talking; and then one at twenty-eight which for some reason took two years before you heard it. But they all agreed you did hear that one, eventually.
Your lousy career, said one guest. Babies, said one of the women. Lovers, friends, travel, said another. Parents aging. Bong. All the things you hadn't done. Might not do. Bong. — Graham Joyce

By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more. — Peggi Speers

Occasionally I've seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings. — Billy Graham

RETURN TO TENDER
Our aging parents deserve the same loving care they gave us in infancy
Kamil Ali — Kamil Ali

Refire - an attitude of embracing the years ahead with enthusiasm rather than apathy. — Morton Shaevitz

If ever we needed to put the Golden Rule into action, it's with our aging parents. — Billy Graham

I think I've become more aware of aging in the last couple of years because of friends dying of cancer or friends' parents dying and myself - I'm still healthy, but I'm aging, and that's something that I think about more, even though I shouldn't be too concerned. — Jose Gonzalez

If nothing else, I have learned that aging has nothing to do with the accumulation of years. Aging is the inevitable defeat of parents by their young. — Jean Sasson

To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors. — Tia Walker

If God gives you responsibility for aging parents, seek what is best for them, not what is most convenient for you. And keep contact with them! — Billy Graham

Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, a week, a year, or a decade, each far too precious little and yet, poignantly too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer. That fear-ridden, irreversible release lingers in the doorway, but hesitates for reasons we don't understand, leaving us to weep with a mixture of angst and gratitude all at the same time. It is finally ushered all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place. When the time finally comes, we can be enveloped in a warm cloak of long-awaited acceptance and peace that eases our own pain. It quiets the grief which has moaned inside of us, at least some, every single one of those bittersweet days, weeks... or years. — Connie Kerbs

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end. — Amy Waldman

Capitalism is out of control, thanks in no small part to Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision which said that a corporation is a person, even though it doesn't eat, drink, make love, sing, raise children or take care of aging parents. You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people. — Bill Moyers