"Had a talk with my old man
Said 'help me understand'
He said 'turn sixty-eight
You renegotiate'

'Don't stop this train
Don't for a minute change the place you're in
And don't think I couldn't ever understand
I tried my hand
John, honestly we'll never stop this train'"
[John Mayer, "Stop This Train"]

When I was young I thought there were only three phases of life: early childhood, adolescence, and then adulthood. I never realized back then that there are many more slices of life to come well past turning nineteen. I'm straddling two right now, and they're very Yin and Yang: testament to the variety of life.

I've come to think of the early 20's as the "piss and vinegar years". It seems like most people that age are convinced they have all the solutions to all the world's ills. Slowly but surely they realize just how big the world is, and the enormity of the problems it faces, and bit by bit they claw back their ambitions. Conquering the world is scaled down to making our own country better, or perhaps just our own city. Perhaps if one could just make the neighbourhood better? Sooner or later it's 'screw that, move to a better one.' The wise are the ones who settle for conquering themselves; the fortunate are those who manage a task that tall.

By the late twenties people are hooking up and settling down, and even my male friends began to tire of the chase. The "IKEA-nesting instinct" kicks in and we're looking for that final living space, that final relationship, that career position with a good salary and a pension plan, and maybe, just maybe, some semblance of stability and calm in the rat-race world we call our lives. But then, at some point the truth of Mary Schmich's "Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young" begins to set in, and we begin to more gracefully accept that "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday." We may never be complete.

Nothing drives that home more than the next two phases which seem to arrive for most nowadays in the thirties. This is the pair I'm straddling now, which seem to come one right after the other, or perhaps both at once: the era of births and the era of deaths. Just as our generation begins spawning and raising the next, the one that went before us starts to waver, and the reality of mortality sets in. Baby photos and funerals are the order of the day. Facebook is filled with photos of newborns. Blogs and guarded personal conversations lean toward the tragedy of old age. In my own life, Olivia is delightfully looking forward to her fourth birthday on Sunday, but my father is slowly dying. I don't say "dying" in the sense that he won't be around next week, but in the sense that he's in his seventies, heavily medicated, on a waiting list for a home, and unlikely to live for many more years. He deals with constant pain. Some days he can't stop of moaning and wheezing. My best friends face similar dilemmas. Two just recently lost their fathers. One almost also lost his mother. At least two more are faced with their parents' failing health. Liza-Ann lost her father just a few years ago.

I had a sneak preview much earlier than the others when my mother died when I was twenty-one. I learned a lot of hard lessons. I can't predict exactly how my father's death will hit me when the time comes, but I expect it won't be nearly as life-changing as my mother's. I'm not as close to my father and that's not going to change. It won't come as a surprise. I can say just one thing with certainty about it: I have made a solemn promise to myself that when that day comes, I will turn to Liza-Ann and thank her for something that she did for me. It was something very important, something which no one else could have managed, and something for which from that day forward, I will always be grateful.

To my friends, I wish I could provide some measure of solace, but coming to terms with mortality, especially the mortality of one's own parents, is something we all share, and yet in which we cannot share but must face alone. All I have is the advice we all already know, but which we all struggle to follow:

Find ways to enjoy what time you have with them. You don't know how much or how little you have left. Don't fill it with arguing over all the things you think might afford you a little longer, but with memories worth cherishing after the bell tolls.