< Back Pam's Story 00:00 / 03:48 My story is about resilience. I have learned at 65 years old that resilience is a process and not a personality trait. I really wish I had learned this when I was younger because I probably wouldn't have spent so much time being so judgmental and critical of myself. Resilience isn't about when something difficult happens in your life and you forget about it and move on. I was ignoring my feelings and stuffing all my emotions into a very dark place. Throughout my life, I've had some bad experiences, more than some people and less than others. I grew up in an abusive household, and it continued until my thirties. The parents were physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive. And because it was so bad, I blocked my knowledge of this even happening. Nightmares and flashbacks were my first clue that something was wrong. Your brain's ability to block memories works by protecting the psyche to help you survive. If I had actually known what was going on, I might have died. Something else that was very difficult in a different way was moving so many times. When I entered ninth grade, it was my seventh move. We moved every two to two and a half years. The dad was in office furniture sales, and we went where he went. This was really hard on me because I would move, meet new friends, then move again, lose those friends, and meet new ones. It was a constant cycle of change. I couldn't depend on anything, so I have very few memories of that time as well. Again, my my brain blocked what was going on. Another way I dealt with the dark inside me was by being a serious athlete in high school, college, and adult athletic programs. I swam, ran, and participated in triathlons. I would recommend to anyone that being an athlete is a good way to spend time, so it's not bad by itself. But hindsight, I was totally running away from my feelings. Again, it was a way for my brain to block terrible memories. And then as an adult, I've experienced many physical issues, including an eating disorder, migraines, TBIs, Parkinson's disease, and a back injury. Only in the last six months have I understood how resilient I am. But the good news is that through this back injury, I've been able to feel both the physical and emotional pain. I started working with a pain management expert out of the Boston, Massachusetts area. People in severe pain tend to make their lives very small by staying at home, not seeing people, not learning new things, or not moving the body. If I shut down my pain and live a small life, it makes my pain worse. I'm not telling you this story to complain. This is a story about how I've been able to look back on my history and learn what it takes to be resilient. I am now making my life bigger by doing small things like playing the guitar, taking singing lessons, and working a part time job as a dragon boat team coach manager. I try to shine a light on my pain to help open it up and heal. I use music, meditation, breathing techniques, and body scans to calm myself down and to be in the present moment. But most importantly, the only way you can heal physically and emotionally is to make the choice that the pain is real. Previous Next

< Back Jonathan's Story, 2021 Jonathan talks with Julia about the importance of his family network during the pandemic. Likewise, he is thankful for social media and zoom technology because it enabled him to stay in touch with his family. 00:00 / 03:46 Again the family network was very, very important. Your children, where are they currently living? Where are they living? Two of them are in Northampton Massachusetts, which is where I am now. Which explains one hundred percent why once we were both retired why we moved here. My daughter said cheerfully, I am quite happy to look after you when you are a Gaga but I am not driving up and down 91. And that seemed pretty reasonable. She's been, she's been wonderful. During the pandemic, you know before we all got vaccinated and all that, she would go shopping for us. We didn’t feel this way but we pretty much lived an isolated life in our house. And she wouldn’t let us go anywhere and it was wonderful. And she was very cheerful about it, never complained. That's a great relationship to have too, and very selfless of her. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean she's, all three of them are very very caring about these old folks that report to be their parents. Would you say, I know you mentioned that now looking back on it, during COVID you were isolated, but would you say that that isolation translated to feeling lonely or would you say on the contrary, being able to use zoom and connect with your brothers all over the country and also with your son in California and having your daughter around, would you say you actually still felt very connected? Yeah, I know that people who lived on their, who lived on their own, have had to cope with learning, there is no question about it. Which means both our sons, so child number one, child number three, are on their own, and different times it’s been very hard. We have a nephew too who lives in Ottawa and he’s on his own, he's talked about that. I think that for people who are partners and who get on with their spouses, some of course are partners but wish they weren’t, but we are not in that category. It's been, it's been much easier. I felt, right at the beginning of the pandemic when it was totally unexpected and we had no idea what was happening, I suppose I felt a little bit, alone. But, having a spouse, having children and grandchildren who didn't come into the house for months but we would walk up and down the street. You know, and chat with them. And having zoom and being a voracious reader, I don’t think that was an issue for me. Previous Next

< Back Rene's Story Rene explains how she feels being the eldest sister of her siblings. She talks through how an experience with her brother brought their relationship together. 00:00 / 03:59 So my first question is what was your role as the eldest self out eldest sister? Well, I'm the oldest of four. And let's see, I have a sister who's two and a half younger, two and a half years, three years younger than I am. And then another. I had a brother and a sister seven years younger than I am. So we were the girls and twins. That's what we refer to as we were growing up. It was wonderful. It's really a position of privilege. And it's also burden. It was also burdensome. I was a lot was expected of me in terms of helping my mom take care of the other three, she was a woman who was viewed as sickly, and I was capable, and I was smart. And I was willing, because I just wanted those parents to walk me into an audit to get me what I wanted to care those kids in January of 2019, my brother, her twin died, my brother died, he had cancer. And for the last three months of his life, the three sisters we're very close family, almost too close. Sometimes we were almost too close sometimes. My three sisters and I went to Florida and took care of him in his in his medical needs were complicated. And three of us just took on what we were best at. My sister Joanne, the youngest one, his twin is good at organizing shows, she would organize things. And everything was very organized. The medications were organized, our schedules were organized. My sister Marina who loves loves, loves animals. She's such a tender hearted woman. Well, my brother had 180 pound English master. And the dog ate only raw food because my brother was very fussy about what his dogs eat. And Marina, we prepare my sister is two and a half years younger, she would really take care of moose ducks name was moose. And she would feed him and make sure he was water bowls. I mean, Moose was a lot of work. It was like having another child and did things that were more around the emotional caretaking of my brother and made sure that every time he left his bed and came out into the main area, and he had this television screen, which was like, like a sports bar television screen, it was huge. And he would come and sit on the couch and blare it out. And I made sure that every time he came out and sat down, loose was on one side of him in a sister, any one of us, no matter what was going on, one of us had to be sitting next to him, like holding his hand or leaning up against what I leaned up against him. I really wanted him to feel and know our presence and our love was very, very moving. It was such a gift to be with him at the end such a gift and in many ways it both is in a funny way it bonded us the three sisters. It bonded us in a way nothing else could have done. And it also gave us some freedom from each other because I grew up in this enmeshed family, family that just to leave the family was felt like sometimes an act of betrayal to go to college felt for me like an act of betrayal. Somehow after Mark step, having had this very intense experience. We found our freedom to be more of who we were, as individuals. Previous Next

< Back Ngozi's Story Ngozi Okeke talks to Tamar Shadur about traveling to Nigeria, dad's special pancakes, and how she would like to be remembered. 00:00 / 02:15 Previous Next

< Back Tolu's Story Tolu talks with Bob about her immigration to the US 00:00 / 04:44 Previous Next

< Back Barbara S' Story, 2022 Barbara shares her story of becoming the owner of a bookstore, specializing in antique books. She shares memories from these years including her knowledge of books. 00:00 / 04:14 Previous Next

< Back Bert's Story Bert speaks about her life journey and how not everything went as she planned. She talks about her adventures with her husband and kids and how she found her way to her career as a Speech Language Pathologist and how that career changed her view on life. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:33 It seems to me that lots of people have kind of a plan in their life of what they would like to do, and they set about doing it. I never had such a plan. I was kind of a vague wanderer among libraries and was really interested in English literature and English history and studied for a bit in England for a little while and I didn’t have a glamour of what I wanted to do with my life. It seemed like it would be good to be useful, but I didn’t have much other plan than that. I got married shortly after college and we had a child and then because I had been an only child pretty much in my life, I thought we don’t want this child to be all alone we should have another one pretty soon. And it turned out that that one turned out to be twins. And suddenly wooo, I had three babies, they were less than two years of age, and I was supposed to figure out what to do with them and I had to stop wandering around wondering what book I was gonna read next. So, it was a pretty hectic and transformative time for me. I had to think of myself as a very different person, responsible for these three little babies and then three wild little boys and I started to sort of become somewhat more assertive I think. I had never been before. After being at home for quite some time with them I thought I really gotta get out of here a little bit and I saw a notice that Children’s Hospital School for Kids with Hearing Loss was looking for some volunteers and I thought well I could probably do that. And I arranged for a baysitter and went down and helped out mainly in an art class with kids with severe hearing losses and they were very interesting. But the director of the program kept saying you gotta go to graduate school. And so after a year of so of prompting I did start a graduate program in speech language at Catholic University. A friend from graduate school who was a little bit ahead of me called and said Bert I’m working at this great school you’ve gotta come and work here with me. It’s a school for preschool children, very young children, with a variety of pretty serious physical and neurological problems and they need another therapist. Okay, here I am. It turned out to be wonderful. The schools had a wonderful transdisciplinary approach so that instead of passing kids around from therapist to therapist or teacher to teacher or whatever, we were in teams. The parents, teachers, physical therapists, the occupational therapist, speech language therapist, we were in a team and we all had to understand what everybody else’s goals were for this child so that anytime you interacted with them whether you were changing a diaper or you were helping somebody have lunch, or you were playing together all of those goals had to be integrated. It was an incredible learning experience and it taught me way more than any course ever could ever have taught me. I never imagined so many interesting, challenging situations just kept unfolding one after another and with the enormous good fortune of always having very good people to work with, not a lot of money but a lot of really good, strong coworkers. I feel very fortunate in my unplanned, kind of wandering way. Previous Next

< Back Eileen's Story Eileen discusses gender roles present in her childhood in the 1950s and how it caused her to choose her career in teaching. She then goes on to talk about how she was able to be successful in her career choice. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 04:20 “How did you originally decide you want to do teaching as a career?” You know I’m not sure how I decided that I kind of wonder if, well I think I can be fairly relational, I mean I really like kids. But um I’m not sure I saw a lot of choices. I'm not sure I realized that there were all these kinds of things like be an engineer, or be an architect, or a doctor, or a therapist, or be a researcher. I think if I, I have no clue if I saw all of that what I would've chosen. I think I really felt that I had two choices, I could be a nurse or I could be a teacher. So I don't really know what I would choose to do, I mean I could've been a good motorcycle mechanic also I kind of like that stuff. But at the time I think I felt I had two choices, and I wasn’t really into the whole blood thing. “Do you regret that in a sense, do you feel like it was because of the time period you grew up in and how women were viewed? That you only really saw those two careers as an option” Do I Regret it…I don't think I have regrets about my teaching. You know I learned a lot all the time, you know as much about myself as about anything else. And I mean I could keep learning, it's endless. So um I don't really have regrets about that. I do imagine I probably wouldn't have done this, you know if I knew then what I know now. But I don't know what I would've done. You know in my world, I mean, there wasn't a mom of anybody that I knew that did anything. I mean I didn’t even know teachers or social workers. I mean I got put in a school with some really good teachers and I got placed there with two or three of my very close friends. And so It was kind of a hoot. It was hard, we were an inner-city school and the kids were tough. I don't know if they were really tough but they were tough for us, like fifth or sixth graders. But I was not alone, and I had this team of teachers, I worked with three teachers, not one. And they were really helpful. And I had my friends there and you know we would literally go to someone's apartment and figure out our week's lessons and kind of do all this stuff and do it together. You know, have some beers and you know just plan it and go down the tubes in terms of being successful and not being successful. I think I worked with some talented people. I think I was pretty average. Some of my friends were remarkably fantastic. And I learned alot from them. And that's kind of how I taught. I always met with other people and friends. You know that kind of hung out together and figured shit out together. Well, that was nice not to do it alone. I was lucky I had very good people. I just fell on really wonderful friends and support, that's the positive thing about teaching, you know you could get really lucky. I suppose you could get really unlucky too. But I got really lucky, you know I worked with great people. I think that's key in life. Who you work with is really, really important. You gotta have people you admire around you, or at least I did, or else it’s kind of doomed. And on the one hand, I didn’t feel like I had all that much choice. I just kind of went down this path, and with going down that path, I at least had a path. You know and I just took it and I didn’t really at the time, well I flailed here and there but I didn’t really question it and I was okay with it and it worked out. Previous Next

Laura's Story In this story, Laura reflects on her connection to modern dance and how it has followed her throughout her life. Scroll to Listen Laura's Story 00:00 / 05:28 Laura: I believe I was four and my mother in a creative movement class that was in the basement of this teacher’s home. She was just magical to me. She—her name was Roslyn Fidel. I have very vivid memories of being in this class at age four and growing like a flower, leaping over rivers, and just the magic of being in the presence of this captivating figure—this dance teacher. So, it never stopped after that. We moved further out of Long Island, and my mother found another wonderful teacher of modern dance. In my—I guess maybe my junior year—I would start taking the Long Island railroad into the city to take classes at the 92nd Street Y. In my senior, I started dancing with one of these pioneers of modern dance, his name was Charles Weidman, and would be in these performances on Friday nights. And then I became a dance major at Ohio State but didn’t last because I actually became ill with anorexia and left school and then there were different steps to where ended up. I was in very bad shape and this dance teacher from my teen years called me, and she said that she had heard another of the students in that group was at the University of Wisconsin and she was studying something called dance therapy. And she thought I might be interested in. She had heard I was having a hard time. So, within a week, I was enrolled at NYU in their dance therapy program. And it was such a lifesaver for me because I had been—there was such conflict, such yearning to dance; and I was so depressed and unable to dance; I didn’t have the strength, and it felt so far away—as soon as I walked into that first class of dance therapy I realized—I discovered that I could bring dance back into my life in a way that would also help other people and be really meaningful and meet me where I was at a person and give me this future. Dance actually didn’t end up becoming my main career. Actually, I got a master’s degree in social work. I managed to through missing dance and feeling that social work was never the appropriate—the best—career for me, I was not one to sit in a chair. I managed to discover a way to continue to dance indirectly through the social work because I was working with elders and discovered there was woman who—Liz Lerman—who had an intergenerational dance company. I saw a picture of her dancing with these older dancers in this Swan Lake lineup, and I was just captivated. You know, I once wrote something about this question of growing older as a dance. When I—often times—and it used to happen maybe more, I would dream about dance. Actually, I just had a dream where I could do amazing things in my dream. I could fly into the stars. I would take off from the ground and sail and wouldn’t come down—things like that. So, I had written this—it was an article actually for a magazine about growing older as a dancer, and this hope that those images when I closed my eyes and dream, that I would still have that capacity to conjure those. That they would still come to me. Because I think the imaginable life—the dream life—is another life and maybe that would be something that would be a gift in my dying days.

< Back Kelly's Story Kelly talks with Jesse about her evolving family dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. 00:00 / 04:10 When COVID first started, it was my sophomore year of college. I was living on campus at UMass. I remember specifically when I found out that it was going to be like a real issue. It was when Tom Hanks got COVID. It was a joke in my family that that was the first time I actually got a little nervous. I was supposed to go on the UMass Habitat for Humanity trip to Georgia, but they obviously ended up having to cancel it. I have two older brothers Kevin and Timmy. My brother Kevin right now is 27. And my brother Timmy, or Tim, is 25. And I'm 21. My brother wasn't living with us initially, he was living on his own, but obviously COVID isolated a lot of people. He didn't want to be alone like that, especially since we didn't know how long it was going to be. So, he actually moved back home with us. It was the first time in quite a few years that I had a full house. It was weird at first, I think, obviously, I had to do online school. And my mom was working from home. My dad's an electrician, so he wasn't even working. My dad's a funny guy. He loves attention. And he hates being bored. So he was bothering my brothers who were working remotely too. So it was just a cluster of us on our laptops for a little bit. But I think it was really great overall, looking back at it, especially at that time, it was nice to kind of get my family all back together for a few months. I feel like not a lot of people have that opportunity. So it was kind of nice. I learned a lot about my own study habits, work ethic, and stuff like that. In terms of online classes, I feel like it was a hit or miss. Some professors were really good at keeping us engaged. We had more than a year online, because we left the second semester two years ago. So it's like I forgot what it's like to actually be in school. Learning in general, it just isn't what it used to be. It's less collaborative. I feel like the pandemic helped me in some sort of way, it had as many benefits as it did the opposite. And I don't think I would change it. I think I was glad to have the opportunity to live with my family like that for a while. I remember having Thanksgiving with my family, which is usually a very big holiday. Like we have people flying into town. It's like a very big thing. And for the first year ever, we had a just Thanksgiving with my family. Just my immediate family, which we have never done before. The turkey. I don't know if it caught on fire for a second. It was a Thanksgiving disaster. I think we ended up microwaving some pizza. It was fun. We had a lot of fun, especially since everyone's getting older. It was really nice to live in my family like that for a little bit, especially now that my brother moved back out. And it's nice. I feel like I wouldn't have had the opportunity to get as close to them as I did. There was one day when it was very early in the pandemic. I live kind of close to Boston. I'm up in Wakefield. They put in the stay at home order. And my dad wasn't working and he and I ended up driving around the coast, around Gloucester, just for the day just to kill time and stuff like that. And when we were driving, he was like “I really want a haircut. I haven't had the opportunity to get my haircut in so long.” So I told him, I was like, “I'll cut your hair that would be great.” And we got back and I asked him, because my dad's getting older and he is losing some hair, I was like “I'm wondering what you would look like if you were bald.” We weren't seeing anyone, so he shaved his head fully. I started shaving, at first we did a buzzer, and then I got shaving cream and we made him completely bald. That was probably one of the highlights of COVID. He looked scary. And he looked like Mr. Clean. It was good though. I thought it was funny. I think that was a good bonding experience between my family. Previous Next

< Back Katerina's Story Katerina’s reflection on how repeated experiences with her father’s and uncles’ cancer shaped her relationship with guilt, grief, and appreciating life. 00:00 / 03:53 Interviewer: Tell me about something that’s changed your perspective in life. Katerina: For me, there is no single event in my life that changed my perspective. It was rather a series of events. When I was in middle school, my dad was first diagnosed with cancer. My parents sent me away the weekend of his surgery. They didn't really want me exposed to what was going on. I always had the sneaking suspicion that something wasn't right. After I found out, I was upset with my parents that they didn't tell me. I know they were just trying to, like, protect me. What I knew about, it was the only thing they had control of still at the moment. Thankfully, my dad was okay. But he was not the only one in my life that was struggling with that. My Uncle, Tony, he had been diagnosed with cancer around the same time my dad was. He fought off for a long time, but then everything all at once seemed to come crashing down again. My uncle on my mom's side, my Uncle Vasili or my Uncle Billy, out of the blue, he had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. At the same time, my Uncle Tony's cancer had come back. And I remember visiting my Uncle Tony in Florida, and my mom had put him on the phone with my Uncle Billy so they could talk about their experience together. And neither of them knew each other very well. And I just remember them reassuring each other that each other would be okay and they are fighters and they would fight it together. Unfortunately, both of them passed on, and I just felt very stuck and I felt guilty. I hadn't been able to say goodbye to either of them, or I was so sure that they would be okay after that. I remember both of them fondly. I was just very upset that I wasn't able to not even attend the funeral for my Uncle Tony cause he was in Florida. And it was just a sad time with things that seemed to keep happening. Then this past summer, I took a big trip to Europe with my friends that lasted about five weeks. We hit five different countries and it was actually very fun. And I knew my parents would be upset when I told them because I'd never done much without them. But when I told them, my mom was particularly angry for a bit, but then she mellowed out and was saying things like, it's okay. You need to enjoy life and enjoy these moments because they're rare. So I went. When I came back, my dad asked me to go for a ride in the car with him. It was the middle of summer, right before my birthday. That was the car ride where he told me he was sick again. Now my mom's angry reaction and then her sappy things kind of made sense to me. He told me not to cry or be sad because I was a strong one and he would be okay. I remember I started to take more pictures of my dad, had a full head of black hair and it even survived his first round of cancer. So I started taking pictures, cause I want to remember what he looked like before things changed even more. So much changed, both with him physically and with things in my family dynamic. I noticed how weak and sick he was. My mom's tremendous levels of stress. When you told people how, like, pitiful they would be. I was forced to pay attention to my own guilt. I remember I felt guilty for even going on my trip, and I felt guilty for celebrating my birthday, and I felt guilty to even tell people, and then I felt guilty for coming back to school. I think my family was used to dealing and guilt. So much has happened in our past history with illness and death. It has become something I become accustomed to, feeling guilty for being happy and living life. While so many people are struggling, it's not easy to enjoy and remember that good things are still happening. I think that's changed my perspective on life, because while I had felt guilty for so long, no one wants anyone to feel guilty for enjoying things. It's not like their whole life was just this event. They had a whole history of good things that happened to them. And they want me to make those memories too. And my dad is okay now, thankfully. He had his surgery, and he is okay. Currently, as I'm about to graduate, very stressed about finding a job, very much in my head, um, about leaving my family. I need to remember not to worry so much about what could happen. I've learned to be very appreciative of every moment and life as I have it. Previous Next

< Back Mary's Story Mary, motivated by her retirement and the loss of her husband's sister, decided to run a breast cancer marathon in Jacksonville, Florida, which was something she’d never done before. She trained in Antigua, and when her race day approached, her husband warmly rallied up her nieces, daughter, and grandchildren to cheer her on with signs and bells, which gave her the final push to be able to push through to the finish line. She felt an intense sense of pride and joy crossing it, and it made the whole moment even more memorable and sweet, having her whole family beside her to celebrate. As she’s now approaching her 80s, she has sight of winning her age group in the half-marathon and running a 10k alongside her granddaughter. 00:00 / 03:16 Previous Next