I loved watching the two videos above, wishing I had the verbal abilities they have, being able to express their ideas so clearly and from a distinct point of view just facinates me. When I get to talking, at some point I seem to get tripped up with forgetting a word, usually a noun or someones name and my thoughts seem to just stop, feeling frustrated with the word loss. I know this is a part of growing old (75) but it strikes fear into me each time having both a mother and grandmother with dementia in the past, it feels like going down the same path. I fight back on these thoughts by doing this newsletter, working puzzles, and spending times with my friends who try to fill in the missing word for me as we talk. That is why one of the areas I include in my newsletter is for Seniors to help all of us make sense of what it means to grow old. I didn’t know that I would wake up with pain in the mornings that would require stretching and just moving around to help make the hip pain for me go away. What growing old has giving me is more confidence in who I am as a person in the world, and what I like and dislike, and a clarification of my values and to try when I can to stand up for those values. So it’s kind of a trade off, finding out who I am as a person, but also accepting the loss of memory and mobility, I think it’s a fair exchange.