My Aunt Annie died recently, age 103.  In my father’s tribe, Annie was one of his elder sisters.  I figured it out lately, that she was 16 or 17 when my father was born (my paternal grandmother had lots of children for 20 years).  All my life she told me, “I raised your father, you know.”  This was accepted lore, and I always acknowledged her for this contribution to my life, my wonderful father.

Thinking on this, I looked back on the life of this woman I have known all my life, and considered her arc from the early 20th century into the 21st.

You don’t have to know my tribe to know folks living into their 90s.  Most of us will live to be 100, particularly the GenXs, if the Big Blue Bus doesn’t take us out sooner.

There are lessons in this thinking:

• We will live long, so we should prosper… to support a full and active lie.
• We should protect, pro-actively, our health and fitness.
• We should chase our dreams now, not later.
• We should set or strengthen our boundaries and not tolerate negative people and actions that diminish us.

And we should honor our elders, who have had lives, no matter how obscure, that we will never fully understand.