09/05/2025
As each year unfolds, you're given a blank slate to craft meaningful connections, memories that matter, and new avenues to spread love and kindness.
They tell you aging is just losing hair and slowing down, but nobody warns you how loud silence gets when memories are gone.
I still sit on the old porch swing every evening. The wood is cracked, the chains squeak, and the paint long ago surrendered to rain and sun. But this swing has carried more weight than any piece of furniture inside the house. It has carried my family, my laughter, my grief, and now—just me.
When I was young, this swing never stopped moving. My kids used to race to climb onto it after supper, giggling as I pushed them with my calloused hands. My wife, Ellen, would sit beside me, mending a shirt or sipping iced tea, and the night air smelled like honeysuckle and fried chicken drifting out from the kitchen. We thought those days would never end.
But children grow. They leave for college, for jobs, for marriages of their own. The swing slowed down, then stopped, until only Ellen and I rocked there in the quiet. She’d reach over, pat my hand, and whisper, “We had a good run, didn’t we?”
When cancer came for her, the swing was where she wanted to sit. We’d talk until her voice grew too soft to carry. I remember the last night she managed to make it out here. She leaned her head on my shoulder, and though she was small and frail, I swear I could still feel all the years of our life pressing against me in that moment. When she was gone, the swing groaned under just my weight. And I thought maybe it would break before I did.
People think the hardest part of aging is the pain in your knees or forgetting where you left your glasses. That’s the easy stuff. The hardest part is the silence. It’s sitting on a porch swing built for two when you’ve only got one heartbeat left to keep it moving.
Neighbors drive by and wave. Sometimes one of my daughters calls. They live in different states now—busy lives, good lives. I tell them I’m fine. And I am, mostly. But fine doesn’t fill the silence. Fine doesn’t echo with the laughter of children running barefoot through the grass, or the voice of a woman you loved for sixty years calling you in for supper.
Last week, I almost sold the swing. Thought maybe if I tore it down, the ache in my chest would ease. But I couldn’t do it. Because hidden in that wood are fingerprints. Scratches from my son’s boots. Paint stains from when my youngest daughter decided it should be purple. The swing isn’t just a seat—it’s a memory you can sit on.
Yesterday evening, something changed. I was rocking slowly, staring out at the same oak tree that has been standing longer than me, when I heard the screen door creak. My granddaughter, Sarah, came out holding a popsicle, her legs too short to reach the floor. She climbed up beside me without asking.
“Grandpa,” she said between sticky licks, “why do you sit here all the time?”
I looked at her. The freckles on her nose, the way her hair caught the last of the sunset—it was like looking back forty years at her mother. I swallowed hard. “Because this is where the best parts of my life happened,” I told her.
She tilted her head. “Can I sit here with you tomorrow, too?”
The swing groaned as she leaned against me, her little heartbeat pressing where Ellen’s used to be. And in that moment, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time—company in the silence.
Tears burned my eyes, but I didn’t hide them. Sarah noticed. She wiped my cheek clumsily with her small hand and whispered, “It’s okay, Grandpa. I’ll keep you company.”
The swing moved forward, backward, forward again. Suddenly, it didn’t feel so empty anymore.
People say aging is about losing things. And they’re right—we lose speed, we lose friends, we lose the certainty that tomorrow is promised. But aging also gives. It gives you perspective. It gives you the privilege of remembering the smell of your wife’s favorite pie, the sound of your child’s first word, the sight of a grandchild’s smile that looks just like their mother’s once did.
I used to think wrinkles were scars of time. Now I see them as roadmaps, showing every mile I’ve walked, every storm I’ve endured. My gray hair? It’s the ashes of all the fires I’ve lived through, still warm with memory.
The truth is, not everyone gets to sit on a swing long enough to hear it creak with age [This story was written by Things That Make You Think. Elsewhere it’s an unauthorized copy.]. Not everyone gets the chance to see children become parents, to watch love pass from one generation to the next.
Aging is not the thief of youth. It is the keeper of stories. And every line on my face, every ache in my body, is proof that I was given the most precious gift anyone could hope for: time.
So when people ask me what it’s like to grow old, I tell them this—aging is not about what you’ve lost. It’s about what you’ve carried. And if you’re lucky, one day you’ll sit on an old porch swing, feel a small hand slip into yours, and realize that nothing you loved was ever truly gone.
Because the gift of aging isn’t wrinkles or gray hair. The gift of aging is getting to live long enough to pass your love forward. And that’s a gift I’ll never stop unwrapping.
