Welcome to A Place to Talk - The Blog for the book Someone To Talk To: Finding Peace, Purpose, and Joy After Tragedy and Loss; A Recipe for Healing from Trauma and Grief
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Posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 1:30 PM
At its new address, the blog has a new name, Peace, Purpose, and Joy, and focuses on what we gain through learning and healing. Please follow this link: http://PeacePurposeAndJoy.blogspot.com to read and join in the conversation about enjoying life more as we age and grow.
The advantage to the new address is that from there you can subscribe to the blog, receiving an e-mail whenever I post something new. I plan to post only once or twice each month, so you won't be flooded with e-mails.
Thank you. I look forward to meeting up with you there . . . .!
Samantha |
Chronic illness, Divorce, Healing from Loss, Death of a child, Grief and Bereavement, Joy, Peace, Purpose, Life Changes, Aging, Positive Aging
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Posted on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 12:43 PM
I’m not talking about being old enough to vote, buy alcohol, get married, have children, or serve in the military. I’m talking about claiming the gifts that are held back until we’re much, much older, have “paid our dues” and are ready to receive and appreciate some rewards.
I love movies, and mostly rent them by mail to watch at home in the evening. But some things are just better on the big screen.
How old do you have to be to get into the movies for the reduced senior price? That varies from theater to theater usually sixty-five, the same age you have to be to collect Medicare benefits and get a senior discount when shopping. Watching Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris on the giant screen felt almost like walking the banks of the Seine – and for only a few dollars!
How old do you have to be to get senior rates at motels? In this case, only fifty. I don’t travel as much as I used to, but when I do, I find clean and comfortable accommodations in the chain motels for less money. Now that I depend mostly on Social Security benefits, every penny counts. So I just show them my AARP card, and the room rate drops.
How old do you have to be to perform in a band for the first time in your life, on an instrument you’ve never played?
The answer: The age you are, right now, whatever that is!
I am having some of the most fun in my life, in my mid-seventies, doing something I always wanted to do – playing the marimba in a big concert band. I rehearse once a week, early in the evening, with some of the nicest, happiest people I’ve ever found gathered in one place. Most are somewhere around my age, and we’re all learning new things. One member of the percussion line is a middle-aged professor learning to read music for the first time. A retired teacher in the horn section is mastering her brand new bass clarinet. The string ensemble practicing in the next room started out sounding like the beginners they are, but their music has become distinctly sweeter over time. When the band rehearsal ends, a few of the horn and percussion folks stick around to practice playing jazz arrangements. The bonus: I’m home and ready for bed before 9 p.m.
At our Winter concert the local middle school auditorium will fill up with spouses and the grown children whose school concerts many of us attended long ago. Younger children will get to see Grandma and Grandpa play in a cool-sounding band. After the lavish homemade refreshments buffet, we’ll break for a month so folks can spend the holidays with their families.
This brain-sharpening activity is part of a world-wide organization of bands called The New Horizons International Music Association (http://www.newhorizonsmusic.org/nhima.html ) created for retired people by Roy Ernst, Professor Emeritus at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, in 1991. Although it’s targeted at the over-fifties, adults of all ages are welcome. The only requirement is that you be willing to have fun and try something new.
I am especially grateful for my band’s motto: “Your best is good enough.”
Did anyone say that getting old is the end of having fun?
For me, it’s a new beginning!
1. What have you always wanted to do for which you didn’t have the opportunity? Paint? Write? Play the cello, or mah jongg?
2. Are you learning something new to enjoy? If not, what keeps you from doing it now? Is there something similar that you could learn to do instead?
3. Do you hold standards for yourself that are too high to accomplish now, so that even “your best” isn’t “good enough” for you? Could you “settle” for just having fun?
I am very interested in your comments.
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Posted on Tuesday, November 08, 2011 9:17 PM
Someone put this question to me recently, and it stopped me in my tracks. I thought I knew myself very well, after more than seventy-three years of being me, but what am I about? I had to think about it.
When I was a child, I remembered, I was about learning new things. I taught myself to read when I was four and could hardly wait to go to school. In school, I loved everything I learned, starting with arithmetic and spelling, all the way on up, years later, to trigonometry and literature. I learned how to read music and play the piano and a wooden flute. In my teens I learned to make my own clothes and to dance and put on makeup, and to walk in high heeled shoes. I was about changing my hairstyle and my wardrobe with the changing fashions.
In my early twenties I was about having new adventures, meeting new people, looking good, being a bride and learning how to cook haute cuisine. I was about reading more books and starting to write for publication.
In my thirties I was all about being a mom and a wife and a homemaker. While the children were in school I went to school, too, and learned a trade, and became an entrepreneur, still about “lookin’ good”.
In my forties I decided that comfort trumped looks. I learned to MAKE shoes, sensible shoes that laced up and had flat heels. I focused on the needs of my family and went back to school to learn a marketable skill. I learned that life brings heartache, and I learned what it was like to lose what I valued most. I was about being single again for the first time in twenty-five years. I was about learning all over again how to meet new people, go to dances, and date. I was about travel and more new adventures.
Then I lost my daughter when I was fifty and I was all about grieving, and about becoming very ill, for a long time.
My sixties were about falling in love again, and beginning to heal. I was about spirituality, woundedness and gratitude, all co-existing within me.
Now, in my 70’s, I am about noticing how my age and my full life have taken their toll on my body, and I’ve become about self-care – going to the gym, eating healthy, and being happy with less nightlife, and fewer calories.
I see the common threads that have run through my life – love of learning, love of people, clambering over the obstacles and pushing through the challenges I’ve met. The greatest challenge in my life now is my aging body – my faltering brain, my failing vision, my painful joints.
I know what I am about, now. I am about learning how to age gracefully and with gratitude, still meeting new people, trying new things, and finding ways to adjust to my new limitations. I am about acceptance, resilience, and adapting.
I am about growing old with flair, meeting old age with courage, grace, and creativity, and continuing to find the joy in every day.
I am very interested in your comments! 1. Do you know what you are about? Has it always been the same, or has it changed over time?
2. How do you feel about growing old? Do you believe there can be joy in it? 3. If someone were to write a magazine story about you, what would you like the title to be? Please click on Add Comments, below, and share your thoughts. |
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Posted on Sunday, October 23, 2011 12:03 PM
Recently, I watched The Natural, a Hollywood movie about professional baseball in the early decades of the last century. I had read the novel, by Bernard Malamud, about fifty years ago. Now, in my seventies, I love movies that take me back to a place and time that I remember living through when I was very young, or that my mother told me about when recalling her girlhood, where things are no longer quite the same. I enjoy having my memory jogged about how things used to be, recognizing the clothes and hairstyles we wore, the cars we drove, and the antiquated furniture and appliances that were considered modern then.
Baseball games were broadcast on radio, back in those pre-TV days. The voices of the announcers, relating all the action on the field and the backgrounds of the players, became as familiar to us as family friends. Without “instant replay,” there were long pauses in the broadcasts when the game stopped while players conferred on the pitcher’s mound or in front of the dugout, allowing radio listeners to experience the low murmur of the crowd in the stands, the occasional airplane droning above the field, or the cry of “Hot dogs!” and “Peanuts, here!” We imagined the games in our minds, and we heard, loud and clear, the unmistakable “crack”the bat made when it connected with the ball.
The movie took me back to lazy afternoons in hot summers of my childhood, when my cousin and I spent whole afternoons on the screened-in porch, listening to the games. The plot of the movie, barely remembered, also had me enthralled. My favorite line was when Iris, played by a young Glenn Close, spoke her famous line, “I believe we have two lives; the life we learn with, and the life we live after that.”
I turned to my husband, a few years older than I, sitting close beside me, and said, “That’s true, I think. We learned a lot before we met, from our first marriages, from working and raising our children, and everything that has happened to us. The reason we’re so happy now is because we know more about what really matters to us.”
I was remembering how, in my “first life,” the “one I learned with”, I would get upset at little things that went awry – a favorite book accidentally thrown out with the trash, a misunderstanding about what I thought we had agreed to. Now, I shrug and can even laugh at just another typical blip in our mostly smooth life – and then decide whether to replace the book or move on to another one, and resolve (again!) to double-check our plans in the future. After all we’ve been through – job losses, homelessness, our own life-threatening illnesses and the deaths of people we loved deeply – nothing so trivial seems worth getting upset about anymore.
I was also thinking about all the gratitude I feel now, late in life, for all the little things we are able to do for each other –for the cups of tea he brings me, the joy I feel when something I do makes him smile, the fun we have preparing meals together in our tiny kitchen, dancing smoothly around each other between stove and sink, from refrigerator to counter, as if meticulously choreographed, and how often and sincerely we laugh at each other’s jokes.
He smiled. “Uh-huh,” he said, squeezing my hand and lifting it to his lips to receive his kiss. I squeezed back and we returned to watching the movie, which – as our life seems to be doing – wound down slowly, the loose ends of the story coming together, as it made its way toward the happy ending.
I would love to know your thoughts about this.
- Have you lived two lives, one you learned from, and one in which you use what you’ve learned? When did the transition happen for you? How old were you when you realized you had changed the way you respond to things. What made it happen? Are you happier now than when you were younger?
- How have you changed? What have you learned?
- Or are you still waiting for the shift to happen for you, and how will you know when it has happened?
Please add a comment below!
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Samantha: Posted on Saturday, October 08, 2011 7:15 PM
I recently had the honor of having a piece I wrote, excerpted and adapted from my book, "Someone to Talk To" (featured on this website), published in the Story Circle Journal. The article is as follows:
"I was in my fifties, divorced, a bereaved mother, in my first year of social work graduate school, rebuilding myself from shards, driven to honor my daughter's too-short life.
I had wanted to do hospice work since before my marriage crashed, since before my daughter was killed.
Years earlier my cousin and then two of my closest friends had been dying of cancer. They each wanted to spend their last days at home, as gracefully and comfortably as possible, but hospice was not yet available. I spent afternoons with Steve as he gallantly lived out his days surrounded by his family. I visited with Anne every week, holding her hand as her strength ebbed and her body shrank, and she told me she wouldn't live to her fiftieth birthday, a month away. I was part of Barry's caregiving team, bringing him dinner on Thursday nights and staying until his son arrived at bedtime. We talked about life, our shared struggles, and his memories, while he slowly died, in relative comfort at home, for a year and a half. Accompanying them through their final days taught me much about courage and acceptance, and the value of having someone to talk to at a lonely and frightening time of life. My memories of those precious last weeks and tender farewells were warm and loving, and I wanted to make that rich experience part of my life's work.
My part-time job that year was in a medical building connected to a hospital. On the elevator going down to the cafeteria, one day, I introduced myself to the Director of the Hospice Program and asked for an appointment to talk. Two days later, in his office, I said, "I'll need an internship next year, and I'd like to do it in your program."
"We've never had an intern," he said, "but I like the idea. I'll see whether we can't come up with something for you.
Two weeks later my new internship materialized.
I was steering my life in the direction of my goal."
The rest, as they say, is history. I achieved my ultimate goals and found purpose in my life.
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