My morning routine used to be pretty simple. My alarm would go off, I’d hit snooze at least once, sometimes twice, and then I’d go downstairs and start the coffee.
Back upstairs to get ready for work. Back down, pour the coffee, grab a banana or a bar, throw my lunch together, and leave. I did it that way for years. Decades, probably. It was automatic.
Now I’m retired, which I love. I still get up. I still make my coffee. But instead of rushing around with a travel mug in one hand while I zip a lunch bag with the other, I sit. I linger.
I take my time with the ceramic mug my granddaughter made me and do some light reading.
And by light reading, I mean I scan through the obituaries every morning.
Every blog I found about aging was a list of things I can’t do anymore
I’ve always been a reader. When I retired, I did what readers do: I started reading about it. Blogs, Substacks, articles written by people my age or a little older who were talking about what this part of life is like.
And at first it was fine. Some of it was useful. Tips about Medicare, what to do with your 401(k), how to structure your days so you don’t lose your mind in the first six months.
But the more I read, the more I noticed a pattern. Almost everything was about limitations. What we can’t do anymore.
The knees, the back, the sleep that doesn’t come the way it used to. The things you used to do without thinking that now require planning, or assistance, or just giving up entirely.
I’m not saying those things aren’t real. They are. I feel some of them myself. But after a while, reading about what’s shrinking starts to feel like that’s all there is.
Like aging is a long list of subtractions, and the only thing left to talk about is what got taken off the list most recently.
It made me feel smaller. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way that drip-by-drip messaging does. You read enough about decline, and you start to see yourself that way, even when the rest of your day doesn’t match it.
So I went looking for something else. I didn’t know what. Just something that didn’t make me feel like my best years were behind me every time I opened my laptop.
I wasn’t looking for the obituaries, they found me
A few months after I retired, I was packing up some things I didn’t use anymore to bring to Goodwill. Old kitchen stuff, books I’d already read, a box of newspapers I’d been meaning to recycle for longer than I’d admit to anyone.
I pulled a section of newspaper out of the box to flatten it, and an obituary caught my eye. I didn’t know the person, but the way it was written stopped me.
It was about a woman named Dorothy who had been a school librarian for twenty-eight years. She raised four kids. She made banana bread every Sunday for her neighbors.
She volunteered at the hospital gift shop until she was eighty-one. She loved crossword puzzles, and hated flying, so much so that she once drove fourteen hours to see her granddaughter’s college graduation because she refused to get on a plane.
It was warm and specific and full. It described a person, not a patient. A life, not a diagnosis.
I sat down right there next to the Goodwill box and read the rest of the page.
There were four more obituaries. Every one of them did the same thing. They talked about careers and hobbies and the weird little details that made someone who they were.
One man was described as someone who could fix anything with duct tape and a flashlight. Another woman was remembered for the garden she kept for forty years and the way she talked to her tomatoes like they were children.
Nobody mentioned a bad hip. Nobody mentioned what medication they were on. Nobody talked about what they couldn’t do.
Instead of packing up the rest of the box, I sat there and read every newspaper I had.
More Bolde Stories
Nobody writes an obituary about what someone couldn’t do
That’s the thing that changed my morning. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it.
The blogs were telling me one story about what it means to be my age: a story about reduction, about managing decline, about adjusting expectations downward.
And the obituaries were telling a completely different story about people the same age: a story about fullness. About texture. About lives that added up to something, described by the people who loved them.
Nobody writes: “She struggled with arthritis in her later years and could no longer open jars without help. Nobody writes: He stopped driving at seventy-four and relied on his daughter for errands.”
They write: “She taught second grade for thirty years and every former student still remembered her name. He built the deck by hand and hosted Fourth of July on it for two decades.”
The obituary is the one place where people my age are described by their whole lives instead of their limitations.
And reading that every morning started to do something I hadn’t expected. It reminded me that the limitations, the ones I read about on the blogs and the ones I feel in my own body, are real.
But they are a small part of a much bigger picture.
When someone sits down to write about you after you’re gone, they don’t write about the things that got harder. They write about the things you built, the people you loved, the stuff that made you specifically you.
The banana bread. The duct tape. The fourteen-hour drive.
I know this sounds morbid, but I promise it’s not about death
My kids think it’s strange. My daughter said, gently, that maybe I should find a happier way to start the morning. I get it. Reading obituaries with your coffee does sound like a warning sign if you don’t know the context.
But I’m not reading them because I’m sad. I’m reading them because they’re the only place I’ve found where people like me get described the way we lived, not the way we’re declining.
Every other piece of media aimed at my age group is about what to watch out for. What to prevent. What to manage. And I understand why that exists. There are real things to manage.
But when that’s the only narrative, it starts to feel like the whole identity of being sixty-seven is medical.
The obituaries push back on that without trying to. They’re not inspirational. They’re not motivational. They’re just plain descriptions of people who lived full lives, written by the people who knew them best.
And that plainness, the straightforward act of someone remembering you for what you did rather than what you lost, is the thing I wasn’t finding anywhere else.
It gave me perspective, and that’s worth a lot
I still read the blogs sometimes. I still pay attention to what my doctor tells me. I’m not pretending the limitations don’t exist.
They do, and some of them are frustrating, and some of them scare me a little if I think about them too long.
But the obituaries put them back in proportion. They remind me, every morning, that a life is not a list of what went wrong at the end. It’s the whole thing.
The career, the kids, the recipes, the road trips, the friendships that lasted forty years, the small things that seemed ordinary at the time and turned out to be the things people remembered most.
When I go, and I will, I don’t think anyone is going to mention my knees. They’re going to talk about the time I drove to three different stores to find the right birthday cake for my grandson.
They’re going to mention the garden, and the book club, and the trip to Italy that I saved for for years and still talk about at every dinner party.
That’s the whole life. And reading about other people’s whole lives every morning, over coffee, in the quiet of a house that used to be louder, reminds me that mine is still being written.
And the next line isn’t about what I can’t do. It’s about what I’m going to do today.
