WHAT HAPPENED? -by Lynn Kloss
Recently I was emailing with a high school friend, and we were comparing stories of our latest challenges – all of which involved dental or health care. We were laughing about how much our conversations have changed over the years. All at once it hit me that it wasn’t so funny – “what happened?,” I asked. When did this old age thing sneak up on us?
It really seemed like we were just going along – navigating life’s challenges: early marriages that lasted 30+ years, and ended in divorce and heartache, forging careers that were hard to let go of after forty years, busy handling family obligations – first children, then parents. Sharing our excitement of late life romances. Now that we are remarried and settled and living our best life – we realize that we are old! How did this happen? I guess time flies whether you are enjoying it or not. I wonder if our parents felt this same jolt of reality when they woke up in their seventies, still feeling unprepared for this stage.
I’m not one to run from one thing to another. I don’t like to fill my days – I enjoy taking time, contemplating my life and setting my intentions. I have to say that understanding my mortality has always been on my radar. Having a chronic illness since age thirty-three brought it into focus. But I always felt young. Now as I’ve let my hair go to its natural gray/white color and feel my age reveal itself in aches and wrinkles, I find myself revaluating my intentions for aging. I somehow feel younger in my 70s than I think my mother felt at this age. I am less accepting of a matriarchal role – more just one of the girls. It’s hard to articulate this. In her 90s, my mother-in-law told me that in her heart, she felt like she was in her thirties. While I wouldn’t want to go back to my thirties, I understand what she meant.
I love that at this stage of life there is time to consider things like this. To ask ourselves, “What Happened?” - and then come up with some good stories to tell ourselves that make aging more interesting.
Lynn Kloss retired from a career in employee benefit consulting in 2016. She went back to school after retirement to get her Masters in psychology, with an emphasis on geropsychology. She has volunteered with seniors and dementia patients since retiring. She and her husband moved to Fort Collins in 2023. They love the weather and friendly people of Fort Collins. Lynn currently volunteers at the Aspen Club and the Museum of Discover.
