She would have been 109 in early April. Selfishly, I wanted her to make it to 110, so she’d be in the official list of world’s oldest people. She didn’t care much. She just figured when you die you die; no point in worrying about it.
She was a sweet lady. Very calm - she was about the only one in Mrs. Slow’s family not afraid to fly. She was pretty with it all the way up through 105, but then her hearing and eyesight were bad enough it was hard to communicate with her, and her mind started to go. Of course, I think she still played bingo up through 106 or 107, I think. I know, how cliche, but she did. She lived at home with her youngest daughter until this year.
Just think. She was born before women’s suffrage, and was eligible to participate in the first US presidential election for which women could vote. She precedes the car, the plane, central heat, the Spanish-American war, and even indoor plumbing in her neck of the woods. She knew people with clear memories of the Civil War. She talked about the Spanish Flu pandemic. She was in her 20s for the 20s. She was in her 30s with young children for the Depression. She was middle aged for WWII. And in her 70s when men landed on the moon. English was her second tongue, even though her family was here for the Revolution, because she was Pennsylvania Dutch (a German group, for those that don’t know.) She never wanted to talk much about “the old times” though - it bored her - so much that she knew is gone.
My grandmother is not quite that old, she’s 102, but I noted what you said about the presidential elections. My grandmother was not old enough for the '24 election, but she’s voted in each one since. for a grand total of twenty.
She also doesn’t get nostalgic for the old days, preferring indoor plumbing, refrigerators and good hosptials to outhouses, iceboxes, or giving birth at home. The only thing she misses is friends and family, she’s lived past every person who came up with her. And her grandfather told her about being incarcerated at Andersonville prison, during the Civil War(shudder).
I love her more thatn just about anyone else in the world.
Sorry to hear about this, but wow - what an amazing period of history to have lived through. I wonder how many people are still alive who were born in the 19th century…
My gram was born in 1896. She saw covered wagons and men walk on the moon all in the same lifetime! Sounds like your gram had a great life. Sorry for your loss.
Mrs. Slow’s other grandmother lived to 97, and died before I met her. We have been together for almost 25 years, so she was born long ago. He husband was 16 years her senior, so even though he also lived past 95, she was along for years. She apparently complained about outliving all of her friends and family, also. (And yes, I figure when I kick the bucket at 88 or so, my dear 95 year old wife will hook up with some sweet young 75 year old, and live off my money!)
What an amazing life. My maternal grandmother is still going relatively strong at 88. She started having some heart problems in the past year or two*, and I’ve been making an effort to visit her as often as I can. Not only has lived through so much change here at home, but she traveled extensively after she retired, and has been to every continent except Antarctica.
Grandparents are neat. Again, I’m sorry to hear of your loss.
*This is her second time with heart problems. When she had triple-bypass surgery in the early 90’s, she was up and walking about 36 hours afterwards. The recent trouble actually started when she got appendicitis and didn’t notice. Her appendix ruptured, apparently, and formed some sort of toxic cyst, which started causing trouble a few weeks later. Trouble, in this case, was that my grandmother found herself getting winded after a modest fifteen to twenty minutes of working out in her garden, so she finally went to the doctor. She was on oxygen 24/7 for a bit, so she finally quit her 60-some-year smoking habit cold turkey. My grandmother’s default state is not “human”, it’s “Unstoppable force of nature”.
Do you think that if we make it past 100 that we’ll be able to look back and say the same thing? Will the world change as much in the next hundred years as it did in the last? Part of me says, "No, it couldn’t,’’ but, you know, I bet a bunch of people 100 years ago thought the same thing.
I’ve thought about that quite a bit. I don’t think we’ll see the same scale of changes. Think about travel. In her lifetime, we went from horse and buggy, trains, and steam ships to the moon and whining about airports before flying halfway around the world. The only comparable changes in the human history of travel was the previous century’s change from wooden ships to steam, and horse to train; and “can’t get there from here” to wooden ships. In the future, there is only routine interplanetary travel, and interstellar travel left.
In her lifetime, we’ve gone from painfully slow photography to camera phones instantly transmitting a digital photograph. From the President’s son dieing of a blister, to a halfway shot at curing almost anything. From pen and paper to digital forms of writing. From a coal stove to the microwave. From live artist to recorded.
I’m sure the pace of invention will continue to grow exponentially, but it is hard to see fundementally new capabilities, like the ability to fly. Sure, we might all watch holograms, or even get our kicks in holodecks, wipe out more species, but that is a change in kind, not a fundamentally new form of enertainment. I guess I can see some inventions that would totally change life on that scale" routine sex changes, designer genes for plastic surgery, eliminating death by “old age”, learning to teleport, AI, the elimination of a gender, but I don’t know if any will happen 108 years after my birth. Perhaps eliminating the need for pregnancy?
I know more and more people in their 30’s and 40’s whose grandmothers (usually) are still alive. They are so lucky (unless the grandparents have dementia and then it’s just a sad situation all around). I lost all my grandparents before I was 21, and I so wish I’d had them longer.
It trips me out that she was old when the moon landing happened.
Actually, most of the dramatic changes didn’t even take a hundred years–only about 30 yrs. In 1920 most Americans had no electricity and no flush toilets, and no car. By 1950, the modern world as we know it was was taken for granted, and nobody was dazzled by all the high-tech.
In the next few decades, I doubt if we’ll see any fantastic developments–just mudane improvements on what we have now.
But if there are any revolutionary changes,(maybe in the next 150-200 years) it will be in the field of biology, not technology.And that could cause deep–really deep-- changes in the human condition.
Genetic engineering to cure diseases…Maybe delaying the aging process, so that 200 year lifespans become common… Maybe figuring out how the brain works, so that it becomes possible to know if a person is speaking the truth or lying. Kinda scary, actually…
My grandmother died a couple years ago a few weeks before her 103rd birthday. Give Mrs. Slow my sympathies; it’s still hard to realize that she’s no longer here with us. When someone who lives that long, it feels like they’ll be here forever, doesn’t it?
My other grandma died at 94 some years ago, but she had such an amazing life – lived in a sod house on the prairie as a child, didn’t see her first car till she was 19, did laundry by hand on a washboard to feed her family during the Depression. She was just the sweetest person in the whole world, and the whole family loved spoiling her when she got older. To this day I try to live the way she did, taking each day as it comes. She did a much better job of it than I did, obviously! But I treasure a letter she wrote me when I turned 21 telling me about her life at that age, ending with, “And they call those the good old days!” She much preferred our current world, too.
I know of that Generation well. My grandma was born in 1890 and my grandpa in 1895. She married a younger man. She was 30 and considered a spinster. They were married 63 years. Had four kids. Two boys, two girls.
They died at the age of 94, five years apart. I was named after both of them.
I wish I could meet with them again for one afternoon and talk to them as an adult to an adult about their lives and what they witnessed, their thoughts and the history of it all.
What an honor you have had to know someone to have lived through so much history.
I swear if I live to be one of the world’s oldest living people and the reporters ask me my political view, I will end up spouting off cliches from SDMB and FARK that none of the whippersnappers will get.
“Secret to life? Why its the Mariana’s Trench for 20 minutes followed by hookers and blow.”
Please give a copy of that letter to your local museum or historical society. We treasure these kinds of things, too. (If there are really personal things in the letter you’d rather not share, you could redact that when you make the copy.)
What a great suggestion, Lissa! I’m almost 40 and still have two of my four grandparents. But none who’ve lived to 100 (so far).
This thread reminds me, though, of a wonderful centenarian I met at church several years ago. Her name was Hazel Wolf , and she was a famous local environmentalist. I was chatting with her after the service, and I don’t know how we got on the topic, but she was telling me of how she “…love[d] to go kayaking out in the Sound. The orcas come right up to the boat and I can pat them on the head.”
She wasn’t bullshitting.
It was a wake-up call for me. Here I am 35 years old, I thought, and afraid to do all sorts of things, and this woman is 101 and she kayaks with killer whales.
[Boy Next Door brought up a good point: She’s 101! What’s she got to lose?]