Elderbloggers are connecting with the past

Olive Riley was born in 1899, the year Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless radio signal across the English Channel. But Riley recently beat the Italian inventor’s feat by transmitting her life story around the globe.

With help from a younger friend, the 107-year-old Australian last month launched The Life of Riley and staked her claim as the world’s oldest blogger.

There’s a surprising amount of competition for the title these days as more senior citizens make themselves at home in blogworld.

Elderblogging stars include Florida-based My Mom’s Blog proprietor Millie Garfield (born in 1925), Don to Earth’s Donald Crowdis (1913) and Maria Amelia (1911), a Spaniard whose grandson created A Mis 95 Años for her.

Amelia’s site inspired Australian filmmaker Mike Rubbo to set up Riley’s blog and start posting the anecdotes she shares with him. Similarly, Canadian Crowdis writes out his entries in longhand and mails them to his family for inputting.

But many older bloggers launch and maintain sites by themselves, sometimes after taking basic computing classes. Local senior citizens looking for assistance in creating online journals can find such courses at the Community Colleges of Spokane Institute for Extended Learning.

“Seniors are very interested in using the computer,” said Pat Freeman, manager of the institute’s seniors program. “Some are kind of badgered into it because they’ve been given a computer by their children. They get frustrated when it won’t do exactly what they want it to do, so they take our classes.”

Blogs and other online communication tools can help seniors stay in touch with family and friends while keeping them engaged in learning, Freeman said.

“Creativity and stimulating the brain helps enrich our lives, not only personally but in our communities,” she added.

Indeed, elderbloggers give the rest of us a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges of aging. They write about the fear and loneliness they face after losing spouses and muse about what songs they’d like played at their funerals. (A blogger who calls herself Incendiary Granny requested the absurdist Marx Brothers classic “Hello, I Must Be Going.”)

But these bloggers also share the triumphs of long lives still being well lived. As Lucy of Golden Lucy’s Spiral Journal recently put it, “I still can’t believe I’m as old as they tell me I am. If I truly believed—in my heart, mind and soul—that I’m almost 85 I’d be shocked, insulted and depressed. I can’t be. There are still things I want to do, things I’m very interested in and a sharp awareness of what’s going on. And I’m still cute. Or I will be once I get my new teeth—or when everybody gets a sense of humor.”

Entries like that go a long way toward putting life in proper perspective. If Olive Riley, who was born in the Victorian Era, can go swimming with her great-great grandchildren over the Christmas holidays, enjoy a shandy (half beer, half lemonade) every day of her visit and then recount the trip via “blob,” as she calls it, what’s stopping the rest of us from seizing the day?

As the author of Last Quarter — Game of Life wrote in a recent post expressing his excitement at getting a new motorized scooter, “…the natural response to the realization of mortality becomes a decision to ‘have some fun while possible.’ “

Who says you can’t stay hip even with sore hips?

Drilling Down

Find out “what it’s really like to get older” at Time Goes By, timegoesby.net/weblog. Maine-based journalist Ronni Bennett launched the blog in 2003 to start “lifting the veil on this mystery of aging.” Bennett also links to dozens of other elderblogs, as does the Ageless Project, at jenett.org/ageless.