My father turned 80 and it’s a time when elders congregate to felicitate a new entrant into their fold. Time has stolen what was once a proud body but I realize that there is more to aging than the mere shedding of strength.
The God of exit beckons and is slowly taking possession of every single human faculty, one by one. For some its physical, with the pain of disease stripping away physical form and for some its the slow decay of brain cells that the Taker demands every day.
The walk to life’s end is probably lonely, not because there is no one around our aged parents, but because the faithful friends of youth, those neurons that were once firing at strength are deserting them daily.
What goes on in the mind of an 80-year-old is hard to fathom, but the clues point to untold stories and unfinished dreams flickering between decaying memory, reminding them of a past, a past that is incomplete and the looming certainty of it, remaining incomplete.
The mind, refusing to accept the limitations of human biology, jumps to the unreal plane, a plane of thought that their sons and daughters cannot comprehend. And that is loneliness.
Every human is a reluctant Karna when approaching old age, the Supreme coming in many forms to take from them all they possess.
But what can’t be taken is what you have given and so it pays to give now the gift of love, a gift of laughter a gift of remembrances.
The gifters are the ones who prove Shelley wrong.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty and rejoice, everything that matters remains, a garden of flowers boundless and beautiful, the fragrance of my deeds stretching far far away ”
The Oh!Zone 
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