This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. On the day that Erma S. blew out the candles on her 50th birthday cake her life wasn’t even half over. (At her request, we are not using her last name.) Most Americans can expect to live 25 or even 30 years beyond the half-century mark, but the 102-year-old Colorado native suspected she would live well beyond that. She had longevity in her family.
“My mother and her sisters all lived into their 90s,” she wrote in a snail-mailed letter to me, “so it was not a surprise that I might live that long.” Still, even as Erma moved from late middle age into old age, she anticipated the loss of contemporaries — her husband and several friends — but she didn’t expect to endure the devastating deaths of a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. “Those were difficult times,” she wrote. “I believe you take it the best you can at the time but it was hard losing them and I miss them.” Erma also misses her independence. Both her hearing and her vision are greatly diminished and she says it makes daily life “much more difficult.” Still, her days are punctuated by visits with family and friends, and she is grateful to have lived long enough to watch her great- …
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“My mother and her sisters all lived into their 90s,” she wrote in a snail-mailed letter to me, “so it was not a surprise that I might live that long.” Still, even as Erma moved from late middle age into old age, she anticipated the loss of contemporaries — her husband and several friends — but she didn’t expect to endure the devastating deaths of a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. “Those were difficult times,” she wrote. “I believe you take it the best you can at the time but it was hard losing them and I miss them.” Erma also misses her independence. Both her hearing and her vision are greatly diminished and she says it makes daily life “much more difficult.” Still, her days are punctuated by visits with family and friends, and she is grateful to have lived long enough to watch her great- …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]