Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my papa’s aging, and it scares me. He loves hitting on women, boasts that he’s popular, and says, “There isn’t a woman I can’t sleep with!” He’s in his 50s.

Apparently he works out too, so he doesn’t have a belly or anything, and he is attractive. But every now and then, when he hasn’t styled his hair, I catch sight of his wild, completely gray hair. Or the loose, sunken skin around his décolletage looks eerily pronounced in the nighttime light. Sometimes I’m startled when I see him holding his phone close to his face because of his presbyopia—it suddenly looks like the profile of an old man. Normally, he’s energetic and youthful-looking. There are times when his comment, “I really don’t want to get old,” feels incredibly heavy. When I see him hitting on and sleeping with woman after woman, as if he’s desperately trying to test whether he’s still a “man” in his final moments, it frightens me sometimes. It feels like he’s so anxious about his shelf life as a man that he has no choice but to have sex just to prove to himself, “I’ve still got it.” Apparently, he recently made an offer to a 19-year-old. When I imagine a 55-year-old man with sunken skin around his décolletage handing money to a 19-year-old girl and holding her, I feel so uneasy that I start imagining he’s going to suck the life out of a young woman. His obsession with youth is just extreme. I’m even starting to become afraid of growing old myself. Whenever this papa says things like, “I’m not young anymore,” or “I’ve still got plenty of time left,” I never know what to say. Of course, I can’t tell him, “You’re already a grandpa…” But saying, “You’re still young!” would be a lie and nothing more than flattery. What do you think I could say that would make him happy? He seems to be absolutely terrified of no longer being a man.