When I’m old...er

I was working on some online indexing of draft registration cards from New York State, dated around the end of the 1890’s this morning, thinking of my mother. She was a genealogist and loved family history. Ahead of her time in many ways, Aurale (“Lee” for short), used technology to further the work of making public records accessible around the world, even before the internet became available to the average citizen. At the time of her death, she was the moderator of two genealogy centered web pages, and had been helping people around the globe find their ancestors long before the big names like ancestry.com and familysearch.org came along. My mother had found a post-retirement work that gave her life significance. She felt her life had meaning and that she still had much work to do. She was busy working until a couple of days before she died. She left a treasure trove of organized records spanning generations. By the time she left us, Lee had already passed through one of the end stages many of us reach when it seems life is complete and doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore. She told me once (many years before her death), that sometimes it seems there’s no great work left to do and the best of her life had already been lived. I didn’t know it at the time, but those are common feelings that many of us experience in the latter years of life. Many of us are living many years longer than our ancestors did. We survive the pneumonias, heart attacks, strokes and cancers that would have, and sometimes did kill our grandparents. For some of us, decreasing physical mobility and independence are depressing. For many people, advanced age brings with it a sense of loneliness, a feeling of frustration in dealing with symptoms of dementia and an increasing inability to express oneself. Often, there are feelings of simply being tired, on many levels… and there are feelings of fear. We fear having to depend on others. We fear we don’t matter anymore. We fear the feelings of disconnecting with everything that seemed to matter for so long. Like we all can, Lee grew through that challenging season in life. She found important work to do and a sense of purpose in genealogy. It became her reason to get out of bed. It helped her feel powerful, relevant and connected to other people. Learn from my wise mother. Find something important to do into your retirement years. There is meaningful work for every season of life. The challenge is to find it. As with everything worth having in life, it’ll require effort and endurance… and it’s worth it.