Lifestyle
Men who spent 40 years being the strong one in their family often reach their 70s with no idea how to say I'm scared and instead they get irritable and everyone thinks it's just aging
I'm 70 and the thing nobody prepares you for about widowhood isn't the grief — it's the Tuesday afternoon at 2pm when you realize there's no one left on earth who remembers what your kitchen smelled like in 1989
My Boomer father ate the same lunch every day for forty years — a thermos of coffee and whatever my mother packed — and I didn't understand until I was 44 that he never once chose his own meal because choosing things for himself wasn't something his generation of men believed they were allowed to do
I quit drinking at 37, went vegan in my sixties, and converted my dining room into an art studio. Every time I remove something that used to define me, I find a person underneath who was waiting very quietly to be allowed to exist.
Nobody warns you that the cruelest part of watching your parents age isn't the big things — the falls, the diagnoses, the forgotten names — it's the afternoon you notice your father has started eating lunch standing up at the kitchen counter like a man who no longer believes he deserves to sit down for a meal
