He was right.

and it is absolutely 💯 % true!

after that, the trials of getting older likely didn't seem as bad

My dad grew up in the Back of The Yards in Chicago during the depression and told us he used to eat lard and salt sandwiches. My mom said her house was firebombed 5 times by the US during WWII.

they KNEW they could

Boy, did she get that one right!

I'd wail "That's not fair!!" about some transgression the world had inflicted on me, an innocent child, and Mom would just roll her eyes and say "Life's not fair." At the time I thought she was being mean for not properly sympathizing with me. But of course she was right.

I contributed to the eulogy for my mother, 22 years ago this month. I made a list of "Mom-isms" (stuff that Mom repeated like a broken record) and "Life's not fair" was the last one. As the rabbi read the list of Mom-isms and got to the last one, I was staring at my mother's coffin and nodded.

Site of the L.A. County Fair. 😀

"Life simply is. It's humans who are fair or unfair".
I haven't seen anything in life to refute that statemement.

It always makes me very angry when I hear people act like fairness is some kind of deific creation that enters our lives like the breath of gawd or whatever.

Fairness comes from human beings. Any unfairness in our culture comes from humans who want to keep that unfairness.

The fact that unfairness still exists in such a 'modern' society proves to me that we want it this way.

cancers and each time she tells me, "What're you going to do, girlfriend. You just keep doing the next thing." (She's great now. All seem to be either cured or in remission.)

Both phrases are said as jokes, but they're pretty profound.

and they didn't.

My life was always supposed to be "whatever I made of it." I guess that's what happens when you're the smartest kid in your elementary school. Your folks -- or, the dominant one, anyway -- think nothing will stand in your way.

Until it does.

Even though she was a woman of faith, she used to say "You get used to hanging if you hang long enough".

My husband likes to say, "That which doesn't kill me hurts me". Apologies to Nietzsche.

I'll leave it at that.

... that growing old is for the birds, but it's better than the alternative.

I knew that meant that whatever event, task, etc he was describing that way, it would be something that I didn't want to do and wouldn't enjoy doing.