Just keep on living

Today was my daughter's birthday and as the family got together to celebrate, my sister called. It made me think about life and living and the women who have gone before me.

My mother's generation have mostly died too young and the reasons for this are many. Among other things they picked up habits their parents never had the luxury of trying. They smoked, drank, stayed up late and ate a lot of processed food. They were also some of the first people to drive more than they walked.

My grandmother's generation lived into their nineties. They did not smoke or drink because good Baptist's didn't do those things and they didn't eat much processed food until they were fairly advanced in age. They began as farm people and continued to garden and cook the old ways well into their middle years.

Both generations lived through the depression, but my grandmother's did it as adults. My mother grew up surrounded by stories of the end of the world culminating in hell fire and damnation. Terribly real and horrific thoughts to nurture a child on, especially during such a bleak period in history.

But I think the biggest difference between my mother's generation and my grandmother's was what they focused on. My grandmother was always looking ahead, planning on what she would do next, talking about being elderly, but acting young. Conquering dark times one after the other, from World War I when she was 18 and right on through war after war, watching men land on the moon, vaccines become available; I think they had a sense of being okay, of being in control to some degree, of feeling they could do whatever was necessary.

My mother's generation talked about death and dying. Old age beckoned with promises of release from the harshness of the world, death was terrifying, but still an escape from a world almost too hard to understand. They bought things with credit, had mortgages, televisions, the world called to them and left them unsatisfied with what they had. I think they gave up too early.

It seems to me that the most important thing to remember is that I need to keep on living. I will not be dead until I die, so there is no reason to go early into retirement homes and assisted living places. Give up paying jobs when they are too hard , but never stop working. Then it is time to do other work, to throw myself into hobbies and volunteering and art and music and anything else I think I might find enjoyable and creative.

No worries. I'll die some day even if I don't think about, but I don't want to waste good years sitting around contemplating that.