What’s difficult is that I am now old and my friends are old and my mother is old. My husband, too, is old. Even my dog has cloudy eyes and arthritis.

And this is difficult because getting old and being old is very sad. It is a falling away of things: memory; health and people.

My husband’s mother died last week. My own mother is in a residential care home and she thinks she’s back living in Hillsdale, Michigan. She thinks people move her down the road in the middle of the night while she sleeps and that they bring her back to her room in the morning. She asks after long-dead siblings and cousins.

My mother-in-law’s best friend, Linda, is in pieces because of MIL’s death. Linda is twenty years younger than my MIL. Linda and her boyfriend lived with my MIL for several years and took care of the house and my MIL, in her later years. Now the house will be sold and Linda will have to find a new place to live, either with or without her boyfriend, who, by the way, has dementia. What a life.

These changes are hard but inevitable. I want to face them bravely but I probably won’t.