In 2016, my husband H. retired and we moved to British Columbia. We’d lived in Manitoba for nearly four decades. Our three grown children had gone elsewhere because of education, marriage, and/or career, our siblings lived in other places, only one parent remained alive and she was in Saskatchewan. We wanted to spend the last stage of our lives closer to family.
photo by Paige Fraser
My age–this stage–includes both celebration and dread. There’s still lots to do and enjoy in terms of work and relationships. When it comes to major life steps, death is the next big thing. I think about that too.
I’m a writer. My new novel, All That Belongs, was released by Turnstone Press this fall. My previous book was a collection of short fiction, What You Get at Home and I’m the author of the award-winning novel, This Hidden Thing, as well as stories and essays in a variety of journals. Please see my website, www.doradueck.com, and general blog for more information.
Writing is my vocation, and it’s also the way I navigate life. Which is why I’m setting out on the journey of this blog. Some writing about aging is relentlessly cheerful and chirpy; other writing about aging concerns itself mainly with challenges and questions–about health, money, end-of-life issues–and often seems gloomy. I don’t want to press down on either end of the continuum but simply to write it as I am, as individual as I am, sometimes cheerful, sometimes anxious. Funny or crazy or just plain great. It’s bound to be inconsistent, as variable from day to day as life is.
NOTE: All rights reserved: all posts/pages on this blog, except for links to other sites or attributed material and comments by others, are the sole and copyrighted property of Dora Dueck and may not be reprinted without permission, except for standard web-linking formats. To use in other formats, or to contact me: dueckdrd (at) gmail.com.
Chronicles of Aging 