Steering Your Own Ship: Barbara Cull and Finding a Way.

Change. It’s said that it’s the only constant. Philosophers and great thinkers throughout history have all grappled with the impermanence of experience, and life itself. It’s always shifting–joy gives way to sorrow, seasons turn, people come and then they go. Those who have sought this wisdom resoundingly come back to the same thought–the more we resist the tide, the more we suffer. But the more able we are to exist in the present moment, the more we can fully embrace what it means to be human.

This month we’ve been focusing on autonomy and environmental mastery– a concept that becomes more fraught with aging. How do we develop and strengthen our sense of self-determination through changes in health, mobility, and loss? How do we simultaneously ride the wave of change, while remaining the master of our own ship?

I sat down to visit with Barbara Cull, a member in her nineties that I knew had undoubtedly steered her way through many waves of grief and change.

What’s her secret?

"I always found a way."

Barbara was born in New York City during the Great Depression to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. Growing up, her family lived in a one-bedroom apartment where she fell asleep listening to her parents' radio.

"We were poor," she says. "But we didn't know it. Everybody was poor." At sixteen, she went to work as a stenographer.

As a girl in the 1940s, organized sports for girls were rare and often discouraged. So Barbara made her own opportunities. She and the neighborhood kids attached a basketball hoop to a streetlight. She roller skated through city streets. She played alongside the boys.

"They said I couldn't do it," she says with a smile. "I did it anyway." That attitude seems to summarize Barbara’s approach to any obstacle. “If I didn’t have it, I created it.” Challenges, to her, are never reasons to stop trying, they’re simply problems to solve.

Charting Her Own Course

When I asked Barbara what has helped her maintain independence, she doesn’t mention luck, she doesn’t offer abstract advice about resilience—she describes living well as a series of ordinary decisions. She adapts. She asks for help. She keeps moving. She lets herself grieve without letting grief become the whole story.

“If you don’t want to do it–don’t.” It’s not a statement of laziness or avoidance–it’s discernment. She’s learned to spend her energy on what matters to her. There are plenty of things she can’t do anymore. She no longer hikes. Carrying heavy jugs of water to water her garden has become too difficult. Some household chores simply aren’t worth the strain.

So she adapts.

Now, she just fills the jugs half full. “This is what I want to do. I want to see these flowers growing. I’m going to find a way to make it happen.”

That willingness to accept help isn’t giving up autonomy. It’s exercising it.

Weathering the Storm

Like anyone who reaches ninety-one, Barbara has experienced profound loss. Friends die. Neighbors move away. Entire chapters of life disappear.

"When you get to be my age," she says, "people die, people move away. It's difficult. You never really get over it. But you have to keep going." There is no denial in her voice, no attempt to pretend grief doesn't hurt.

When I ask how she's coped, she tells me about losing her grandson at just thirty-eight years old.

"He loved baseball and Field of Dreams. I watch it every year and think of him."

Barbara doesn't avoid memories because they hurt. She hits on a timeless piece of wisdom here. That, though it goes against our nature to sit with sorrow, to accept discomfort and loss, it’s part of the dance. And we know that the longer we live, the more change and loss we experience. It’s a sorrow and a gift–likened to a shipwreck in this poem that comes to mind–“The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”- anonymous

We end by talking about the surreal nature of memory and experience–what was once there, often just isn’t anymore. “I have regrets sometimes. I have a maudlin cry,” Then she says she’s just too busy to dwell there. She’s busy doing precisely whatever she wants.

“Do what you want in life–don’t let obstacles keep you from living your life on your own terms.”

There’s one line from Field of Dreams that stuck with her, and resonated with me deeply.

"We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, 'Well, there'll be other days.' I didn't realize that that was the only day."

She remembers watching the Twin Towers collapse in 2001, thinking of the New York neighborhood she had known so well and the aunt who had once worked there. Memory, she reflects, is strange. What once existed often doesn't anymore. But life continues, and so does she.

- By Leah Blackwell

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, LARSO is driven by impact rather than profit. Our goal is to improve outcomes and generate positive, lasting change for older adults throughout Los Alamos County.