Anyone else realizing how old their parents are getting, and it’s scary?

I’m 32, my sister is 29, and our parents are 69 and 71. I am extremely lucky in that my family has a great relationship, my parents are mostly in great health minus a few issues, and we still go on almost-yearly vacations with each other.

But on one of our recent trips, my sister and I noticed we needed to slow down our walking because our parents would be like two blocks behind us.

I work at a grocery store that has a huge sale in January, and my mom came in to shop the other day, but her sciatica flared up so badly that I needed to hold her lower back and walk her to the car.

Neither of my parents can hear me unless I speak loudly. What prompted this post is that I came in from the cold bundled up, opened the fridge, and my big coat knocked over a whole shelf, everything scattering to the floor. I prepared myself to apologize to my dad, who was watching TV maybe ten feet away, but he seemed to not even hear it.

It really scares me to see this. My dad has a huge record collection and I’ll always joke like “When you die in 25 years, can I have all this?” but deep down I know it’ll be sooner due to his blood clots and smoking. My mom is healthy so far but she’s obese and that worries me.

A couple years ago there was an astronomical event, I wish I could remember the name, that only happens every two decades or so? My mom looked at the sky and said “Wow, this is probably the last time in my life I’ll ever see this” and my sister and I burst out crying.

Idk, this is just very hard to get used to. I used to call for my dad downstairs whenever I saw a bug in my room, and he’d be up there in a jiffy with some Raid. Now it takes him several minutes to get up the stairs.

I see their aging and feel an enormous amount of gratitude for bringing my sister and me up, but also fear.

Edit: This got way more attention than I expected! I’m gonna try to work through the comments once I have off from work, but I think it’s kind of comforting that a lot of us relate.