When Time Overlaps
- conniepombo
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
There is something quietly disorienting about being in your seventies while your parents are in their nineties. On paper, the math works. In the heart, it feels almost impossible.
Most people my age speak of parents as memories—black-and-white photographs, familiar stories retold, voices recalled rather than heard. Mine are still here. Frail, yes. Slower, certainly. But alive. And that single fact sets me apart in ways I never anticipated.
It's a strange intersection of time. I'm old enough to be considered elderly and young enough, apparently, to still be someone’s child. I hold decades of marriage, motherhood, grief, and joy behind me, yet I'm still watching the people who gave me life inch closer to the end of theirs. We're aging simultaneously, just at different speeds.
Having parents in their nineties is both a profound gift and a tender burden. Gratitude and vigilance walk hand in hand. Every phone call carries a question mark. It's as if time itself has learned to tiptoe.
There's also the quiet role reversal no one prepares you for. The people who once steadied my steps now need steadying themselves. Decisions once made effortlessly now require careful guidance. Love shifts from being received to being fiercely, intentionally given.
What surprises me most is the loneliness of this season. Few of my peers are navigating it. Their stories of loss ended years ago; mine feels ongoing, stretched thin across time. I live with a kind of anticipatory grief—one eye on gratitude, the other on what I know is coming.
And yet, there's grace here. To say goodbye slowly. To still say “I love you.” To witness long lives that quietly testify to endurance, faith, and the mystery of longevity. Not everyone gets this kind of overlapping time.
I didn't expect to be in my seventies with parents nearing a century of life. It is uncommon, yes—but it's also sacred. Time has bent in my favor, even as it teaches me how to let go.
Perhaps that's the lesson of this season: to hold both truths at once. To live fully while loving tenderly. To honor the gift, even when it's heavy. And to remember that being someone’s child—at any age—is a privilege that eventually, inevitably, ends.
~ Connie