By Mary Cristy

I promised myself and Editor Bruce Barton to write no more gloom-and-doom articles. “Be positive!” “Celebrate!” Like Metropolitan Opera diva Beverly Sills, who has two handicapped children, I can chirp and vow, “I can’t be happy, but I can be cheerful!”

But the late eminent psychologist Viktor Frankl, who spent four years in a Nazi concentration camp, conceded that cheerfulness was not always possible.

With more than a little bit of luck and superhuman staying power, Frankl managed to survive horrors and lived to age 92. He produced a body of work on man’s search for meaning profound enough to rise above and beyond his illustrious predecessors Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Frankl’s commonsense observation was, “We should be happy, but we have to have something to be happy about.”

I have a storehouse of treasured memories, a childhood warmed with parental and filial love, a 58-year marriage to a man who dedicated his life to making my writing dreams come true, and who built me a studio flanked by oaks where squirrels chattered and beneath which soft-eyed does rested on a summer day.

Friendly neighbors, lifelong friends and readers who provide warm and welcome feedback and occasional reprimands keep me on track and brighten my days.

So, in the words of Stephen Foster, “Why do I weep, when my heart should feel no pain, why do I mourn that my friends come not again?” Why do our “golden years” grow colder and lonelier when we count dear ones who have gone before, and cause us to dwell upon our deprivations rather than our blessings?

In part, it is time thundering by like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to leave war, famine and pestilence in their wake. In part, it is a sexual revolution that shattered a gracious structure, smashed the icons of a postwar generation and opened the way to shatter the tapestry of romance and ethics, when a man’s word was his bond and a litigious society didn’t mandate pages of legal gobbledygook to preclude a ruinous lawsuit over some asinine minor technicality. What once was a simple telephone call can now turn into a time-consuming and frustrating exercise in futility.

We now have moms working away from home, out of necessity rather than choice, since it has become de rigueur for each family member to have a cell phone, as well as a television set and computer in a room of their own.

Elders have no place in the scheme of things and struggle to adapt in a fast and angry world. For the luckier ones there may be a feeling of having been blessed with retirement’s rewards, though these are too often bought at the price of independence and authority. Those who remain healthy and financially secure may count themselves lucky.

But despite the magazine depictions of seniors biking, dining out, dancing and prancing with radiant partners, there are the less fortunate eking out lonely days in poverty.

The images projected are too often the product of wishful thinking, victims of a culture unmindful of their needs.

Sometimes, on overcast days or on stormy nights, memories wrench, and we listen to our inner cries of pain and echoes of the past.

Then it behooves us to tell the beads of our rosaries and remember life is eternal, and rejoice in the Cross that bespeaks our mortality, even if it shines with a promise of reunion, resurrection and abiding love.