Fullofkittens wrote:

Anyway, at Thanksgiving, my cousin said to me "was I careless with you seven years ago? Did we hang you out to dry when it was your mom?" and what I said was meant to reassure her that I wasn't mad about it but it also unintentionally sounded like an indictment of how she's been acting. What I said was "you know, in a lucky family everybody eventually lives to see their parents die."

This stuff is getting harder because we're getting older. As the pendulum swings, tragedy becomes the new normal, I suppose. I think this is where religion was supposed to help us? No atheists in foxholes, as they say. When you're in your 20s you get bored of going to weddings, when you're in your 70s you probably get tired of going to funerals.