Memento Mori

I didn’t want to write about this. It makes me sad. Like in a profoundly mournful type of way. About getting old, or older.

Aging is one of those things everyone sees but no one really looks at. It hits too close to home. Too direct. You can ignore it for a while, but the train is barreling towards you.

You start to notice it in your parents first. The way they move their fragile bodies slower. How they pause in the middle of a sentence, searching for a word they’ve forgotten. The way they start asking if you remember things, as if they need confirmation that it happened. They carry more pills than you remember them ever taking. They talk about their friends back home who are now sick, or gone. You catch them staring off sometimes, not at anything in particular, just out toward some quiet distance. You realize they’re drifting more into memory because the past is all they have. And that realization sits with you in a way that sinks into your core.

There’s a shift that happens in life. It’s hard to explain. At some point, you stop imagining life in terms of what’s to come, and start looking in the rearview mirror at what has already passed. That part sneaks up on you. One day you’re thinking about what you’ll do next summer. The next, you’re thinking about the last time your whole family was together. The last time you saw someone and didn’t know it was the last. The last time something felt new.

I keep replaying a video I saw yesterday in my head. A dad and his daughter just messing around with filters on TikTok. Laughing and having fun. He puts on an aging filter. His face gets older with each passing second. She laughs at first, but then you can see her face sink. She starts bawling her eyes out. Completely undone. Because even if she couldn’t say it, she felt it, that at some point, he will be gone. Her dad, who was just right there, smiling at her. That’s how close mortality can sit without anyone saying a word.

We do everything we can to avoid that kind of reminder. We treat youth like it's the default state, and aging like a glitch we’re trying to delay. Every product is about reversing or preserving or “aging gracefully”. It’s all cope. The goal isn’t to age well, it’s to look like you haven’t aged at all. When someone tells you that you don’t look your age, you feel good about yourself. Like you’re getting away with something.

But you’re not. No one is. And eventually it stops being about the physical stuff. That’s surface level. The deeper part is quieter. It shows up when you’re alone. Like when you see your family dog slowing down and realize you're already preparing for the end, even while they’re still here. You try to enjoy the time you have left, but the knowing starts to bleed into everything. Even the good moments carry weight.

There’s something about watching something you love age in front of you that makes time real. It doesn’t matter if it’s your parents, your pet, yourself, anything. The loss shows up early. Before anything is actually gone. Just the awareness of it is enough to hurt.

Even in the wild, animals seem to know. When an old wolf feels its time coming, it breaks away from the pack. Wanders out alone. Lays down in the cold. That’s it. No ceremony. No final goodbye. Just stepping away, because it knows it can’t keep up anymore. It’s instinct. That quiet understanding that you’re no longer needed in the same way, and you don’t want to slow anyone down.

It’s brutal. It’s nature.

You try not to think about it most days. You keep moving. You go to work. You buy groceries. You look at your phone. You stay busy. But the reminders always come. You hear a song you used to love and it doesn’t hit the same. The people you looked up to growing up are no longer relevant. You remember a version of yourself from ten years ago and feel both close and far from it. You wonder if you’ve done enough. If the things that once felt urgent ever really mattered.

At a certain point, you stop dreaming about the future and start measuring how much of yourself is still intact. You start to count what you missed. The people you lost touch with. The things you didn’t say. The version of your life that never took shape. There’s no announcement. Just a slow flip of your internal compass.

You want to be grateful. And you are. But gratitude doesn’t cancel out the mourning. It just makes room for it.

There’s no one moment where it all shifts. Just a slow collection of signs. A feeling that builds. You walk through your day, and something small hits. Maybe your reflection in a window, an old text, a kid calling you “sir” or “ma’am”, and it stings, I can’t lie. You’re not where you were. And you’re never going back.

You still laugh. You still feel joy. But even that feels different. Like something that’s passing through you instead of staying. It doesn’t linger the way it used to. You try to hold on, but joy is slippery. Time is slippery. You wake up and another day has gone.

Aging isn’t just physical. It’s waking up every day and remembering what you lost, what you never had, and how fast the rest is going.

That’s the weight of it. Not the lines on your face. Not the birthdays. But the shift in direction. When you stop moving toward something, and start trying not to lose what you still have.

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