Aging isn’t for wimps, is it?  And, there are times when it seems that as a single woman I am falling apart without a support system.  It’s easy to have a pity party, isn’t it?  But, if you need a pick-me-up just look around you to feel pride.  Look at the people who you have helped, the people you have raised, the people you have lifted up in your world and I don’t care who you are, you will swell up and send that pity party packing.

I was at an event this week to honor my uncle.  When we were assembled to take a family photo, I thought, “Who would have ever imagined the paths that our lives would take and the families that we built around us?  Who would have thought all of this would be possible nearly forty years ago when our lives looked pretty bleak?”

My uncle and I both lost our parents in our twenties (my mother was his sister).  He lost his wife to cancer in his early forties, just one month after cancer took my mother.  I can remember being at my aunt’s funeral and feeling like the sky was falling.  We were a couple of sad sacks, and we were the last ones standing in our little family.  Mark was left with a six-year-old daughter to raise.  We had both had a lot to deal with in each of our short lives.

My uncle remarried and has lived happily ever after.  And, while my marriage wasn’t a happily ever after situation, I have three wonderful adult children who are proof that I did something good.

Now, here we were at a photo-op, my uncle and his wife, his daughter, their grandchildren, and me with one of my sons.  This was our family that he and I could never have imagined all those years ago.  This is the family that we both wish our mothers could have known.  For me, it was a moment.  I felt so much pride, even though nothing was about me that day.  I just kept thinking about where we came from and where we are now.

So, again, I say that aging isn’t for wimps, and sometimes it feels like the Titanic.  But once in a while, you get a glimpse of what your life has been all about and I can’t imagine even one of you not being able to look back at your lives and think about what you have accomplished and the people you have helped or nurtured along the way.  And, again I say, just look around you to feel pride.