I can remember the precise moment I became aware of my own mortality.

I was 35 years old, flying from Vietnam to Japan through some turbulence, when the plane just dropped out of the sky. The overhead luggage compartments flew open, luggage went flying, everybody screamed. The pilot screamed through the intercom in a foreign tongue. That was the scariest part – nobody spoke English. I looked at the panicked Oriental faces. What is he saying? What is he saying?

It lasted about ten seconds, the plane righted itself again. It felt like an hour. Nobody said a word, at least not in English. Just a bit of turbulence. The rest of the flight was a white knuckle ride for me, and every flight since. In my imagination up until that moment a plane crash would involve the jet gracefully descending like a bird toward the ground, offering hope of a heroic escape, not plummeting straight down toward the earth like a stone. Months of rugged survival on a lost desert island, until finally, discovery and rescue. The triumphant return to civilisation, hardened, bearded. My god, he’s alive! He’s alive!

That was the end of my youthful invincibility.

Over the past few months, I have sat by my ailing father in hospital beds, listening to his stories about his childhood and my childhood, stories of his youth in World War II, stories of long dead family members, listening to fancy machines doing the breathing for him when he couldn’t suck in enough air for himself. He’s still fighting, still clinging on to life. We can’t complain, 84 is a good innings, if he has to pull up stumps this year.

The other week, on one of his many dismissals from the hospital ward, we sat waiting for the nurse to bring him his take home medical pack. Ten times he asked me what we were waiting for. Ten times I asked him to lend me fifty dollars. Ten times he told me with a smile he wasn’t that senile yet.

My mobile rang, it was my mother asking where we were. ‘Yes mum, we’re just waiting for his medicine. We’ll be home soon, mum.’

Dad looked at me and asked, ‘Is that my mum on the phone?’

‘…Dad, your mum died thirty years ago.’

When I look in the mirror now, the stranger I see with the greying hair and crows feet is not the graceful youth I still perceive in my mind’s eye.

One night I dreamt I was sitting with my son in a room, and he was talking and laughing with a youthful boy of teenage years. They were talking about going outside to kick a ball around, and I was excited at the thought and eager to join them. And then it suddenly struck me that the youth was his own infant son grown tall, and I, I was an old man. Too feeble to get up out of my chair and join them outside under the sun.

In my parents’ slow but inevitable decline, I see my own mortality.