The poem ends on an ironic note. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker describes the ways children do not understand or appreciate their parents. The children believe the parents are old, wrinkly, mistake-prone, sick, smelly, and not as successful as the children will be.

At the end of the poem, though, the parents have died, and they have taken all their wisdom with them. As a result, the parents have left the speaker alone, and he is now an adult and a parent himself. As he comes to terms with death, he realizes his own children do not understand his new wisdom and fear, and he is in the same position he put his parents in before.

This is a form of situational irony where the speaker intends or expects one thing to happen, but then the opposite thing happens. The speaker intends to do better than their parents and intends not to become their parents, but the speaker ends up in the same place their parents were. This repeating cycle is only known to those who have already gone through it, and by the time someone goes through it, it is too late to change what came before.