Since the time I was a small child, I loved being around older people. I grew up in Massachusetts in a large family with lots of elders. I was blessed to know three of my great grandparents. Great mémère and pépère couldn’t converse due to dementia symptoms, but we gazed from across the room into each others’ eyes. Great babcia mainly spoke Polish, so we spoke through our eyes. When my first grade class visited a nursing home, I think I was the only kid who wasn’t scared. I saw all that life in their eyes. Always the eyes.

As a young adult and middle-aged adult I pursued my aspirations. Life unfolded. I built a career in nonprofit leadership. I met my husband when we were both 25. We traveled the world and shared a life in New York City for 30 years. I earned a second masters, became a life and leadership coach, and launched two different consulting businesses.

Meanwhile, over the course of decades my curiosity introduced me to taoism, stoicism, and theosophy. To yoga, meditation, and mindfulness. To reiki, plant medicine, and neo-shamanism. To the tarot, the akashic records, and astrology. I delved eagerly and happily into these diverse forms of understanding our place in the cosmos, and each revealed some truth and beauty.

Yet I continued searching…

In our late 50s my spouse and I decided to leave New York City to slow life down. We moved to Rhode Island where I began volunteering in hospice. I remember coming away from the first visit with my first hospice patient. I knew I’d come home. It was here that I was brought back in contact with elders experiencing dementia, and shown that I possessed a unique willingness and ability to give comfort at the end of life.

Now finding myself in that sweet spot of my 60s—neither young, nor elderly—I am carried along by the river of life offering my skills and my presence as an elder kin.