Old age is fraught with challenges. One has to give up control of the body, of the living situation...Children finally get to dictate the order they have been trying to impose from the moment they became adults. However, there is a certain freedom attached to old age. One can say what one thinks. My friend was out walking with her mom when they met a small dog. After making the appropriate fuss, she turned to my friend and said, "That's a why bother dog!"

My mom had difficulty with the presence of my grandmother.

She had lived with us and cared for us for so long that my mother worried about not caring for her. Long after my grandmother died, my mother looked for her. And so I put up a sign in her living room, "Grannie is dead." It worked. She said that whenever she got that feeling, she just looked at the sign.

A friend told me at one point that his mother worried about what had happened to her house. I told him about the sign and so he put up a sign: "The house is sold...and grannie's dead." He did the latter to honor my sign. One day he visited his mom and asked her if she felt better about the house. "Oh yes," she said. "The house is sold." And then she hesitated..."But I didn't know grannie was dead."