Healthy parents are both a genetic and a generational blessing.
As their children, we can then hope for long life and the pleasure of benefitting from their accumulated wisdom and experience. The ravages of age often cause us to invade both their privacy and their personalities as roles reverse and we offer them, or must impose upon them, the kind of care that they once gave us. My parents, Milton and Evelyn Lieberman, were solid citizens of the middle class. My father was in the shoe business for most of his adult life and my mother worked as a cashier in a bookstore. My father retired in good health at the age of 62 and my mother followed him several months later when she was 62.