Yeah, I know, I'm kind of stuck on this subject right now.

I was watching "You Got Mail" on TV last night. There's a scene right near the end, where Kathleen is closing her store for the last time. In the background her voice is reading a letter she wrote to Joe in which she talks about how painful all this is. She says that it's like losing her mother all over again, and then she turns around and they show her remembering her mother swinging her around when she was a little girl.

And I cried when I saw that, because my mother is getting so old lately, and what will I do when I lose her?

The thought came to me though, that as hard as it is to lose our parents, how else can we ever really finish growing up? If our parents, our older generation stayed around forever, if we never had to learn to live without their guidance and the benefit of their wisdom and experience, then wouldn't we be in a position of never really leaving our role as their children?

I imagine it's hard and lonely to be the oldest generation. It can't be easy to be the ones dispensing advice and comfort, with no-one to turn to but others of your generation. There's something so important about that, though, about taking up in your turn that responsibility.

That's the stage that I'm looking toward in my life. It won't happen for years, yet, not even for decades. I hope not for decades, at any rate. It's coming, though. Already I've noticed that I'm pulling away a little from turning to my mother for advice and leaning a little more on my sisters.

There's this thing people do sometimes, where we'll pre-grieve. We'll imagine a loss, and mourn a little as if it had really happened. (Psychologists have a name for it, but I can't remember what it is, right now.) I see some of that in what I'm doing right now, part of coming to terms with my aging, I guess. I'm mourning things I've lost with the turning years; I'm also looking forward and mourning what I know I'm going to be losing in the years to come, not just people, but support, comfort, stories of the past, community, the safety of having a generation between me and the edge of the world.

Because it's my turn next, to stand there on the edge of the world, pushing back the night, holding the past within my memories.