The Elders Being Healthy is a Blessing to the Younger Generations

this is the way we all want to age, not my photo…

keeping ourselves connected with others in our lives, friends, relatives, families, it’s a KEY to staying healthy!!!

Translated…

As I got wed, my father other than being concerned about how I was adapting to my in-laws’ way of life, he’d often asked about the health statuses of my in-laws.  I’d answered his inquiries, with this, careless manner, and my father smiled and told me, “The wellbeing of the elders, are the blessings of the children!”, I’d nodded, not really understanding his words.

As I’d lived through over a decade of happily married life, my children are very well-behaved, and my in-laws, are not only healthy, they also, carried that active way of life too.  On the weekdays, my husband and I headed out early in the morn to work, and didn’t return home until late in the evenings, and my father-in-law would take my mother-in-law out to hike, or just do some gardening, and when they shop for groceries, they’d naturally, kept us, two middle-aged, weakened people in mind: taking the laundry in, cooking the meals, changing the bulbs, giving the kids a lift to school…………

Life is so easy and steady, my husband and I put everything we had into working, and, the fact that death is a lesson of life slipped our minds.

Five years ago, my father-in-law died of an aortic dissection, and my own father, had quietly, put up, with the tortures of his own cancer, until he was terminal, did he request, that we take him to the hospitals for a check up, but by then, there was, nothing the doctors could do, and so, in just one year, we’d lost, two fathers between us.

not my photograph…

But, the days still passed by, no matter how much pain we were feeling, we’d still needed to work, to raise the children, and deal with the nitty-gritty from day to day, as well as the ways of the world too.  And now, my mother is elderly and ill, the few of us, siblings, ran from Taoyuan, Chiayi and Tainan.  No matter if it was, the long-term illness’s impact on the newly formed family, the caretaking, the money, that’s tested us, siblings, the way of care provided to our mother, had often reminded me of my father’s words, “the health of the elders, are the blessings of the children”, and the way he’d smiled so kindly, as he’d told me this.

So, this, is the wisdom that the father passed down to the daughter, because we will all eventually grow old and one day, die, and, by the time we’re all elderly, all we can hope for, is to NOT be a burden to our younger generations, but sometimes, it doesn’t happen that way!