This is #4 in a series of short essays on aging.

The world of the old is introspective. Memories take up more mind space. So do regrets, very often.

Self-reflection is a natural response to recognizing that we are near the shoreline. We have lived a lot of years and may not have many left. Our chances for change are limited—we lack the strength and the boundless future to reinvent ourselves. So we contemplate what we are. We ponder our families of origin, our siblings and our parents. After all, that’s where we were made.

As younger people we took our families for granted. We focused mainly on ourselves, our dreams and our anxieties. Our parents seemed as unalterable as El Capitan. We reacted to them much as we reacted to the weather: they just were.

That awareness has shifted as we grow older. We still focus on ourselves, but now we can’t help seeing how much our upbringing made us who we are. We reminisce about the past and ponder its meaning. The perspective of a long life draws us toward our family because our family is where we became ourselves.

Our relationship to siblings changes, often for the better. When we were young, our relationships to brothers and sisters could be anywhere on the map: as close as a second self, or as distant as the man on the moon. This huge variability closes as we get older. Whether siblings have been distant obstacles or closest friends, they usually grow more significant to us as we age.

That’s certainly true for me. For many years my siblings and I drifted along, mostly at a distance. Friends mattered more to me. In the last ten years or so I’ve grown closer to family members. I realize how much they matter to me.

Our brothers and sisters are the only people in the world who know our parents as we do. They not only remember our childhood home, they can draw a map of it. Your childhood school? The church your family attended? The family’s favorite restaurant? Stories of how your family bought the Christmas tree? Siblings know all that. (They may remember it differently, but that only emphasizes your kinship. Nobody else knows or cares.)

All this commonality might make it seem easy to be close. Not necessarily. Decades of living in different places with different spouses and different careers have pointed you in different directions. Some sisters are as close as, well, sisters, but others have had little to do with each other as adults. It takes time and patience to find your way back to each other. Hurts that haven’t healed and disputes that were never settled are not easily resolved. To become truly close, not just occupying the same space at family gatherings, you must work through the torments of the past.

In my own family of origin, and in my wife’s, the path toward siblings has been up and down and in and out. It has taken years, and it’s ongoing. When I look back, though, the trend is clear: we have (all of us) sought to come closer together. Not perfectly, certainly, but—when I think of the contrast, the before-and-after—definitely. We have reached out. We have gathered together. We have made time to meet, remember each other’s birthdays, celebrate important days. With our parents gone, we lost a built-in reason for communicating and gathering. We had to make a choice: will we put in the effort to befriend these people who know us so well but also don’t know us at all? I don’t think we ever talked through that decision, but we made it, nonetheless. We would put in the effort.

As a result we are much more comfortable together. Not perfectly. Nothing in life is perfect. But better enough for us to share memories and sharpen our understanding of how our parents and grandparents and community and church shaped us.

In drawing closer to our siblings, we are reaching down into our roots. Knowing them, we inevitably know ourselves better. Siblings can access our source code better than anybody.

**

With parents it is the same, yet entirely different. Like our siblings they know us very well, but from another angle entirely. They were never our peers. Often it’s difficult for them to treat us like adults, because their memories are loaded with diapers and tears and, later, teenage irresponsibility.

We have the same problem, only looking up, not down. We get stuck in childhood too. Our parents were once like mountains to us: huge, immovable. We couldn’t imagine that they had feelings and failures. Our adult selves have a hard time forgiving them for their imperfections.

Parents who abandon the family, who are drunks, who are addicts, who (God forbid) sexually assault their children, or physically and verbally abuse them—their children may never get beyond what happened when they were young. They may not want to. They suffered such a primal wound.

Most of us, though, resent parents over faults that seem far less incendiary. They failed us emotionally. They didn’t believe in us. They weren’t available when we needed them. They were so strict. They made us feel guilty. These may not sound like terrible crimes to other people, but in a parent-child relationship everything is magnified. Just as siblings have issues to resolve, so do parents and children. To work patiently at that is a sign of maturity, which we should aspire to as we grow older.

The greatest issue with parents, however, is one we can’t get over: parents leave us. Our parents die. They may be mentally vacant, a shadow of the persons we grew up with. They will not contribute much to our self-understanding under such conditions.

This is a wound of a different kind. Old hurts will not be resolved. Memories of the past will not be shared. Our parents’ absence leaves a void in our lives.

My wife Popie and I both lost our parents decades ago. We miss them. We feel empty space where their love and support used to be. They have answers to family questions that I never thought to ask when I was younger. Now nobody can answer me.

It’s helped me that my sister Elizabeth collected and catalogued letters preserved from my parents’ younger days—when they were in college, when they met and fell in love, when they were newly married. I’ve spent some happy hours reading through the binders of letters. It answered some of my questions about family history, and it gave me a window into my parents’ lives before I was born. I’m grateful, but it’s no substitute for their flesh-and-blood presence.

We should bend every effort to go deeper with our parents, to extend love and forgiveness to them while we have them. They make up a part of who we are. We carry their genes. We have gestures and habits and sayings that we unconsciously inherited from them. They produced us, and if we seek self-understanding in our later years, they are the best source. It’s not necessarily easy—remember those emotional scars—but it is worthwhile, always. This, I believe, is a primary task as you near the shoreline: get to know your parents if you still can.