Some as they approach middle age, some only when they are old, wake up to understand that they have parents.

To some the perception comes with their children;
to others with the pang of seeing them walk away light-hearted out into the world,
as they themselves turned their backs on their parents;
they had been all their own, and now they have done with them!

Less or more have we not all thus taken our journey into a far country?

But many a man of sixty is more of a son to the father gone from the earth, than he was while under his roof.

What a disintegrated mass were the world,
what a lump of half-baked brick,
if death were indeed the end of affection!

   ~ George MacDonald in Home Again