How will I possibly cope when my parents are dead?

DEAR BEL I AM writing for advice on how to overcome the flip side of counting my blessings.

This is the constant awareness that my blessings will one day come to an end. In my 50s, life is all I could want.

I’m content with what I have — house and garden, good friends, a loving partner, a part-time job I enjoy, good health, financial security. By choice I don’t have children, but enjoy the company of friends’ children and nieces and nephews.

I am fortunate to still have both my parents, who are in their late 70s, who live locally and are both fit and well. I’m close to them both.

These parents are the root of this letter. You see, I cannot imagine my life without them, but obviously one day that will happen. A much older friend once told me: ‘The world is a different place when you lose your parents.’

I’m filled with a feeling of dread knowing that, inevitably, I must live in that world.

I constantly rejoice that I can afford to work part-time and pop round to see them a couple of times a week, just for a chat or to help.

Most days start and/or end with texts to and from my mum, or a quick phone call.

I really don’t know what I’m hoping you’ll say, or whether there’s a book you could recommend to me.

As I said, it is this feeling of the inevitability of loss which scares me, and the fact that it will happen, and I don’t know how I’ll bear it when it does. STELLA

Nearly 600 years ago a great Scottish poet, William Dunbar, wrote a lament for fellow writers who had passed away — and one relentless phrase hammers through his beautiful sad lines of mourning: Timor mortis conturbat me.

The latin phrase is taken from the church service for the dead and translates: ‘The fear of death disturbs me.’

It was a common theme in medieval poetry — that terror of death and what lies beyond. It warned you to lead a good life while you could.

Has humanity changed? No, not in that respect. It’s natural to fear our own deaths and also to dread the loss of those we love.

Once you become a parent, for example, you are placed forever on a rack of terrible anxiety, knowing that the world (and health) may one day threaten the small head you love and that ultimately you are powerless to halt the process.

and when you love your parents (as sadly not all people do) you fear the time when they will no longer be there to give you the support you’ve counted on all your life.

I understand this only too well. My own mother and father have reached the grand, glorious ages of 94 and 92 and I have no hesitation in telling them here (they are Mail readers) that although we never talk about it, I dread losing them, because they mean so much to me.

and I will always be grateful for the love and support which enabled me to live such a fulfilling life.

This love between parent and child, child and parent is an indescribably precious gift. I often hear from my contemporaries who have lost their parents that they feel that now they themselves have stepped forward into the firing line.

But you know that, don’t you? like me you count your blessings while realising with sadness that nothing lasts for ever. already now we must all look ahead to autumn, sensing in the subtle tones of the trees that the leaves will fall before we’ve had time to blink.

and why must they do so —

their golden-brown crunch underfoot so enchanting and so melancholy at the same time?

Why, to make room for the delicate green of new leaves in the spring — those that will fill our hearts afresh with joy.

This is the great cycle of life and we all revolve within it — leaves, flowers, animals, fish, birds, humans, stars. In the words of the poet Robert Frost: ‘So dawn goes down to day / Nothing gold can stay.’

That is how it is, and always will be. World without end.

All we can do is meditate on the knowledge that (if we take care of it) the gold of this planet will be renewed.

You ask me to recommend a book to help you come to terms with this truth.

I offer the great literature of humankind, which has always concerned itself with (among other things) the inevitability of love and loss.

If I had to pick one title it would be Soul Food: Nourishing Poems For Starved Minds, edited by Neil Astley and Pamela RobertsonPearce. I turn to it again and again for clean, beautiful insights from many cultures into the human condition.

How will you ‘bear it’? Because we must, Stella. No alternative but to give thanks for the love of a parent and know that it is stronger than death.