This morning while passing a window, I saw an elderly couple walking up the driveway of our neighbors down the street. They were bundled up against the cold, and they had their heads bowed as they watched their slow and careful steps over the patches of ice that remained after this week’s snow. Their torsos leaned forward, as we’re inclined to do when we age, and watching them make their way safely to the house, something jiggled in my heart, and I felt an ache in my throat.

What I felt was a sudden splash of emotion because this couple reminded me of my parents who were in their forties when I was born. If I’m to be completely honest, I was, by the time I reached junior high, ultra-aware of their age. Sometimes I was embarrassed by it; at other times, I was fiercely protective. They were my parents, and I knew, even at that young age, they were advancing at a more rapid pace than my friends’ parents to the ends of their lives. My time with them was fragile.

All of that came back to me as I watched this elderly couple across the street. The sight of them connected me to the complicated emotions I felt as I moved through my young life with my older parents. I felt the connection immediately. We can try to forget what haunts or troubles us from the past, but the present can intrude on our attempt at denial or amnesia. It can put an elderly couple on a slick driveway on a Sunday morning in February at exactly the right time when I could see them.

It would have been, if I were an unfeeling person, easy to forget that couple and the churning of my heart. I could have pressed down on the memories of my parents, submerging them once again, but clearly the universe wanted me to deal with them. Otherwise, why would I have passed my window when I did? So I’ve spent my day remembering what it felt like to always be worried that my parents would have a medical emergency in public, and what it felt like to watch them climb the three flights of stairs to my once-upon-a-time attic apartment, and what it felt like to see them in conversation with my friends’ much younger parents, and how elegant my mother looked on the wedding day of my first marriage in her new, light blue dress and the white gloves on her hands, and how my parents stayed, exhausted as they must have been, to help clean up the church basement after the reception. Typing this brings me to tears. It reminds me of how much my parents loved me—even my father with whom I had a difficult relationship during my teenage years—and how sometimes, even though I loved them in return, I wanted to turn away from their advancing years and the infirmities they contained.

The point of all this? When the past finds you, don’t look away. Be open to everything around you. When the invitation comes to revisit something you’d rather forget, have the courage to accept it. Use it to get a better understanding of yourself and others. Celebrate the fact that we’re all made up of contradictions. Make room for those contradictions, and by so doing, increase your capacity for empathy and forgive yourself and others for what pain you and/or they may have caused.