Welcome To

The Elder Journey

Where elderhood is understood as a threshold of integration, wisdom and possibility

Helping people discover meaning through story, reflection, and the developmental journey of later life

Facilitator Guide

The Stories We Carry

The Stories We Carry is a six-session reflective life story workshop designed to cultivate meaning, connection, and community in later life. Through guided reflection and facilitated conversation, participants explore the experiences that have shaped their lives while discovering the common threads that connect them to others.

Created to be freely shared, the facilitator guide is intended for libraries, Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI), senior centers, faith communities, community organizations, and informal gatherings of older adults.

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The Narrative Arc of Aging

The Narrative Arc of Aging offers a fresh and compassionate perspective on later life, reframing aging as a dynamic stage of growth, meaning-making, and continued becoming.

Drawing on research, theory, and the profound power of personal story, this book explores how narrative shapes our identity, guides adaptation, and opens the door to wisdom, connection, and generativity.

How Stories Shape the Lives We Live

Coming August 2026

Soul Notes

A Guide to Eldering through Reflection, Story, and Meaning

Every life is a story, and every story carries a soul note – a resonance waiting to be heard. The elder journey can be a reflective passage through the landscape of your life -- a guided process of remembering, honoring, and making meaning.

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Books to reimagine aging

Exploring the changing story of aging, identity, purpose and community

Why Aging Still Needs a Revolution

More than fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir published La Vieillesse, a monumental and unsettling study of old age. She was warned not to write it. Even naming “old age” was taboo. When the book appeared in English, its title was softened to The Coming of Age—a euphemism that revealed just how uncomfortable Western culture was, and still is, with the realities of growing old. Beauvoir’s book was bleak, documenting the cultural contempt that renders so many older adults—women

The Baby Boomer Generation — A Cultural Story

Long before anyone became a “boomer,” demographers, journalists, and policymakers were trying to understand a puzzling rise in birth rates.

Aging Without a Script: Identity, Individualization, and Narrative Meaning in Later Life

This reflection draws on ideas developed by sociologists Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, whose work traces how later life has been reshaped by cultural and economic shifts over the last half-century. They offer a powerful lens for understanding the world older adults now inhabit. What follows is my interpretation of those themes and why they matter for anyone navigating, supporting, or reimagining later life today. For most of human history, later life was a social location