Time Marches On

I haven't posted here for a bit and think it's time. This was posted a couple years ago. This shows five generations of first daughters in my family. I am the baby in the black and white photo, and the middle one in the color photo. I have a birthday coming and I'm pondering about aging as I become as old as the bonneted woman in the black and white [my grandmother] and as my mother in the color photo. These photos prove much about health and medicine and that progress has been made over these 70 years.

I know, also, that a progression has taken place in what women expected of their lives and how they live them, it has much to do with education and even more to do with the pace of change in society. My great-grandmother went to school only a few years and the same with my grandmother but my mother graduated from high school. I was the first in my family to graduate from college. The others lived within a few miles of where they grew up for the rest of their lives. I have lived far from home and traveled farther than any of them could imagine. I did not know my great-grandmother [she died two or three years after that photo] I believe my grandmother had a simple kind of acceptance in her later years, suffering from congestive heart disease and doing nothing about it; taking breathlessness and decline as an expected progression. My mother had massive heart surgery and later became depressed by macular degeneration which contributed to her lack of will to live after another heart attack. I think she hoped for better final years. I think I will remain healthy much longer [but who knows?] and my expectations are much brighter. My coping skills are greater and I'm financially better off. So that brings me to another birthday... tomorrow.