Middle Adulthood

When you ask a person who has not yet started to grow physically or emotionally what their thoughts on aging are, it is probable that you are going to get a negative response, or even a reaction from them like they think that it is never going to happen to them. I think that there is a stigma attached with the aging process. The media, personal peer groups, and other everyday encounters seem to influence the opinions people have on growing older.

I interviewed my father on his thoughts about the aging process, and to me it seems as if he enjoys the effects of aging and the quality of his life now that he has reached his early fifties. He told me that the only negative noticeable physical change that he is going through is losing his hair, nothing else really seems to upset him entirely too much.

My dad has had some pretty serious recent health concerns, and he is convinced that getting older has made him more susceptible to specific risks, such as diabetes. He recently has been diagnosed with diabetes and is still working to figure out how to control it through diet and exercise. Some other health related concerns that my father has become more susceptible to since he has aged are diverticulitis, which affects the intestines, and gall stones, both of which he has recently been diagnosed with. In early December, my father went in for surgery to have part of his intestines removed, and because of his age, he felt like the healing time took a little longer than it would have just a few years earlier.

The main causes of my father’s stress are financial reasons, and he said he can for retirement, which should be here within the next five years. My dad also told me that he hasn’t gone through a mid-life crisis and has never reviewed his life to see if he would do anything differently, he is happy with where he is in his life at the moment, especially with his marriage. My dad said that now that he and my mother are older, they do more things together, and they are closer than they were before. His relationship with his children is excellent, even though they all live further away from him than they did before, he claims that absence makes the heart grow fonder and they value the time spent together even more since they aren’t around each other every day. My dad also said that he felt the empty nest syndrome with each one of his four children when they left the house, but contributes their absence to the ability of him and his wife to spend more quality time together, and do more activities together as well.

He kept clinging to the idea that absence makes the heart grow fonder when I asked him about his relationships with his siblings and with her personal friendships as well. He is referring to moving to southern Iowa, and how it just seems to make the time spent with his family and friends more meaningful. He is still in regular contact with all of his living siblings, even though since there are ten of them, it can get a bit tough to keep up with everything and not actually be around. My dad said that even though he still keeps in contact with his friends since he moved, it isn’t as often as he would like, and he has made an entire new set of friends where he is living. The difference is now, the friends that he has since he is older, have more interest in the same hobbies as he and my mom do, such as fishing, and camping.

Being a grandfather is one of my father’s favorite things, and he explains it to me as “Wonderful! We get to spoil them rotten, and then send them home!” And when I asked him about how he felt about his aging parents, he replied “It’s life, you have to expect it. I don’t like it, but I accept it”.

The last thing I asked my father for the interview, were his thoughts on death. He has been a police officer for over twenty-five years, and worked with the United Nations on dangerous missions to Kosovo and Bosnia, so on more than one occasion he has had to think about the possibilities of something happening to him. When I asked him about his thoughts on death, he was kind of short with his reply, and just told me “Another one of those things that you have to learn to accept.”