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Early in the pandemic, when we were eager to fill hours, replace an in-person activity with an online version and enjoy quasi-face-to-face contact and conversation, we signed up to test the waters of live virtual classes. Some of our kids and grandkids were learning this way, so we figured why not try, too? During the past 14 months, we have engaged in exercise sessions from rooms throughout our homes, carefully craning our necks to look up at a screen to see how the instructor did this or that pose, and sometimes switching off the camera when we were tired or...

Today’s blog is fictional with a fairy tale twist. It’s about a real-life princess who becomes a queen and marries a prince, who dies before she does. How does a queen deal with spousal loss after a 73-year union? For help, she calls in the authors of Suddenly Single after 50 (us) for advice. Of course, we obliged.  London—Once upon a time, a lovely 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth II met a dashing young royal, Philip Mountbatten, who subsequently became a prince. The two were married for 73 years.    Their union was a far cry from a fairy tale, although they...

 As we approach Mother’s Day this year, it got us thinking about how our parenting styles have changed now that many of us have adult children. Doing a good job at this stage generally reflects a cautious balancing act. Telling adult kids what to do just doesn’t cut it any longer. It isn’t anything we did; we’ve all had wonderful times together. But in a flash, our kids have grown up as we also grew older. They separated from us and now have their own lives. And isn’t that what we wanted for them? “Mommy May I” has become, “Hey, it’s...

One day, out of the blue, Barbara received an email from a long-time friend, Dennis Lockhart, 74, the 14th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Now retired, Lockhart, had lost two wives to different, protracted illnesses. He wrote Barbara, “Since it’s most natural for women to survive a husband, I was thinking that there are a lot of guys out there who haven’t thought about everything they have to take care of when a wife or partner pre-deceases them.”    The email started us thinking about how differently men and women seem to deal with spousal loss....

  You get up in front of a group. All eyes are on you. You are about to speak and suddenly laughter erupts. You look down and realize you are buck naked. You shriek and run off the stage.  You just had a common recurring nightmare about humiliation when performing. To take it a step further, some therapists believe this common nightmare is also about guilt and inferiority, according to a piece in HuffPost, “What it Means When You Dream About Being Naked in Public: It’s all about keeping your emotions in check” by Sarah DiGiulio, Feb. 23, 2017.  What about...