Empowering Aging Voices:
Perspectives on Aging and Life

I willingly acknowledge that I am getting older. I view it as a perpetual learning experience. This aging process has everything good in it along with everything bad. Good because I am still here to think, talk, and write. Good because I have family and friends who I love and who care about me. Yet, bad because I have some annoying health issues. Bad because I see ill health and decline among my contemporaries. Bad because I have lost so many people who enriched my life. 

Much is written about aging. A lot of it is from a distant, data-driven perspective. Some of it from a firmly entrenched stereotyped outlook. 

What’s missing for me is the voice of the person who is in this life-stage. 

For eleven years, I wrote “Aging in Places” for the Newton (MA) TAB. In my articles I tried to reflect the real experiences that we elders live through. Readers told me that my words reflected their own thoughts and feelings. When the TAB went out of business, so did my column. 

I have been posting new articles on my blog and am frequently stopped in the supermarket or in the condo hallway by someone who tells me how I am affirming their concerns and dilemmas. “This is what we are all going through,” they say with deep emotion. 

I am responding to this reality and hope I can help any one of us to not feel alone.