What are The Golden Years?

 

Have you ever heard that term. Recently a friend of mine and I were discussing what the Golden Years really mean. It is a relatively new term coined in the 1950’s by a retirement community for marketing. Supposedly when you retire those are supposed to be your golden years. I think about that with dad and mom.

At 55 my dad had worked in the coal mines for many years. He had black lung, back trouble, high blood pressure, and maybe a few other problems. The culmination of mining work had left him basically unemployable in the coal mines (the old timers around called this “Broke Down.”) The mine workers pension was not available for him like it had been for his father. A local coal operator created a job for him.  He was night watching at a reclamation site. They didn’t need a watchman where this site was located. But, they had been friends since childhood and he knew dad wasn’t able to go underground anymore.

He was able to cut his own grass and did most things an older retired person might do. Not many of the things he really wanted to do though. They did not have healthcare coverage. During this time mom found a lump in her breast but with no healthcare she didn’t go to the doctor about it. Golden years my ass, they had to worry about money all the time. They owned their home but lost their boat, had to let a car go back. Mom didn’t go to the doctor till it was too late. The mass in her breast was the size of a grapefruit.

Dad managed to get Social Security Disability and a black lung settlement and that is what they used to get mom the mastectomy. He had Medicare but she wasn’t eligible yet. But the cancer spread to her uterus and she had to pay for another surgery for a complete hysterectomy. Their ship had come in and sank at the dock. They had expended all of the black lung settlement on hospital visits. All the while my dad wasn’t telling what was wrong with him. Mom wound up being an eleven year survivor of breast cancer which by the time she was unable to fight anymore it had spread to her chest wall, bones and lungs. She died in 2003 in her own house with family around her. We expected that mom would go first. She was 67 years old and four years younger than dad.

Dad was just able to hide things a little better. When mom asked him why he didn’t tell her his reply was “I had to be as strong as you.” In June of 1997 he had told his best friend he thought “he was eat up with cancer.” In August of 1997 dad went out and cut his grass with his riding mower and started hurting in his lower abdomen. Later we would discover that his large intestine had ruptured. We took him to the hospital where two of our local surgeons worked on him for hours. Two men I trusted very much. After the surgery they told us that dad had cancer and that his colon had ruptured. They removed the colon but the cancer had spread throughout the abdomen. I asked if they could get it all and the Doctor looked at me and said he couldn’t. “To have got it all we would have had to gut him like a fish.” I appreciated his bluntness.

Dad made it to ICU long enough to make a living will and they moved him to a private room. He was dead by the next Friday. He couldn’t take the medicine for the pain because of the black lung. It shut his respiration down. But he didn’t want to be on a vent either. So he took the meds. He died six years before mom. Golden years, yeah golden years!

So far Crystal and I have had golden years. We retired and bought an old farmhouse and have renovated it to the best of our ability. I was still doing pretty good and her health is Ok too. We don’t worry too much about our health. I have more health problems than her but her father was dead and in the ground at 52, so she has already outlived him. Being a nurse she hates going to the Doctor but wants me to go with regularity, our own little double standard.

We do pretty much what we want. Like all older people, there is a hiccup every now and again. All our parents and grandparents are passed into history and are alive only in our hearts and dreams. We moved away from our little Appalachian hometown because it didn’t offer anything for our children and we wanted to be a little closer to them. So we followed a dream of a homestead of our own like my grandparents had.

She has her 100+ year old farmhouse with the crown moldings, country kitchen, and poster beds and I have nine acres and a tractor. “Green Acres we are there!!!!”

There is still more work to do to make this homestead into the homestead of my grandparents. I don’t know if my golden years will let me finish them but I will keep plugging until I fall off my lawn mower. So are we in our golden years. Well, I guess we are. We pretty much do what we want when we want. There is never enough money to do everything we want. But that is the trade off for retiring early. She already outlived her dad and I have 7 years to go to outlive mine. Sometimes our health keeps us from doing some things we want to do. But, hey, life is full of decisions and trades.

I hope this finds you well. We will send up a prayer for you and ask you to send one up for us. So far it is our golden years. We don’t anticipate living into our seventies but we just might. We will take every day with love and hope and keep moving forward deeper into our golden years. It is really something to be with someone so long and love them so much that you know what they are thinking before they utter a word. There is a comfort to that kind of love.  It makes me know that Life, Like Homesteading, is a Marathon Not a Sprint – Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride. I know we will cherish every day, even the tough ones!!!

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