Daily Snapshot

Managing the Family Legacy

When our generational cover is blown we inherit the family legacy. The sober moment when our last aged parent dies leaves us blinking in the sunlight of mortality. We become the keeper of the family legacy.

The business of managing the family legacy extends beyond organizing our parents’ archives and dispersing their assets. We are now the family matriarch or patriarch. If we choose to shoulder that responsibility, we become the moral compass of the family. And although we cannot claim to know all truth, we do have something to say based on our seniority.

Shaping and sharing the family story can be a heavy obligation to avoid, or an opportunity to contribute something of value to future generations. With the wisdom of our years, we recognize that deciding what to say, how to say it and, most important, when to speak is a challenge.

That the stories vary with each teller is, in itself, instructive. Matriarchs and patriarchs most likely speak the similar truths, but in different fashion. The important point is that we are the caretakers of the family story. Our understanding of our family history and the understanding of generations to come is within our power to shape.

Collective wisdom

Collective wisdom holds that our memories of our forbears go back three generations. But genealogy records now grant us access to ancestral events that go back further than that. We can use these unfamiliar stories to help us understand who we are.

As memory custodians, we can only tell our stories in three ways: As they were told to us; as we experienced them; or as we have managed to piece together from records, anecdotes and photographs.

Accuracy we leave to the historians. Our purpose is to keep the family legends alive. Our privilege is to offer our own unique perspective in the hope that our stories will be useful as well as entertaining. After all, some of our fancies and foibles are coded into our DNA.

Research finds that individuals who are, for example, artistically creative have a specific genetic characteristic that may enhance their creative ability. To know that we may have inherited artistic or musical talent encourages us to believe our pursuit of such an interest might be successful. What a lovely legacy.

A piano stood in my parent’s living room. On a blonde wooden Baldwin, My mother practiced the pieces she would play to help young dancers in my grandmother’s ballet studio keep rhythm. I practiced my piano lessons on that piano. When my granddaughter began music lessons, I shipped it to her, along with now antique music books. I told her the stories of her musical heritage. Many years later, she shows promise of exceeding the accomplishments of the musicians that went before her.

On the other side of this coin, to realize we might have a genetic leaning toward less desirable behaviors, such as short temper or substance abuse, empowers us to address weaknesses.

I was raised to believe we had Native American blood. That supposed fact, the Irish my husband was said to have brought to the mix, and the stories we heard about alcoholic relatives led us to caution our children. We told them they might be susceptible to addiction. As it happens, DNA testing proved my Cherokee roots nonexistent and my husband’s Irish heritage greatly exaggerated.

We had to recant. No regrets, though. Our children developed the habit of moderation. The truth is, these legends and myths existed somewhere in the minds of our ancestors and deserve the telling. The light of new knowledge adds the element of mystery to some family stories.

Telling our stories

What’s your story? How will you tell it? Charting a family tree may provide a reasonably accurate record for future generations, but sketching the leafy branches in story form is far more revealing.

At first glance, your tree may appear to be a uniform sample of its species. But move your gaze through its branches and you will likely find broken limbs and odd grafts. This is a storyteller’s gold; a writer’s eureka.

A well researched biography (non-fiction) captures the facts. A masterful storyteller, David McCullough for example, informs us of verifiable historical events in a compelling way. But there are other ways to leave a legacy in written form.

Memoirs—the telling of personal and family stories— are riding a wave of popularity. The genre acknowledges that the accounts are subjective, drawn from memory and told from a unique point of view.

Family sagas are an intriguing mix of fact and fiction. To tell a good story historical fiction writers have to make up what they don’t know. Digging into ancestral records can raise facts that help shape a story, but it won’t be strictly accurate. And it doesn’t need to be.

Family legends

My next novel is based on the adventures of my great grandmother Nellie Belle Scott. Family legend has it that she divorced her husband and left her children for a career as the first female court reporter in the Pacific Northwest. At a time when most women stayed married and stayed in the kitchen, she traveled the legal circuit and enjoyed the respect of attorneys and judges. Her job was to provide stenographic services in small town courtrooms and newly constructed, big city courthouses.

I had two main sources of material—a sheaf of her short stories I inherited and the stories my family members told, many of them negative. As I researched the sketchy facts of her life I discovered something interesting. Her younger sister Jessie named her daughter Nellie. Obviously, her opinion was not so harsh.

My job as a novelist was to discover what in my great-grandmother’s character inspired such high regard from those who knew her growing up. I now feel I know my great-grandmother, even though she died before I was born. I also understand my family dynamics in a new way.

Story-lines

What legacy will you leave the generations that follow you? You are a link in a generational chain. You are the caretaker of the story trove—memories of mothers and fathers now departed, or young people who left life too soon; perspectives on how we came to be the people we are; documenters of the people, places and things that have formed the culture of our individual tribes.

Timelines record events. Story-lines capture family relationships that fray, possibly to re-thread generations later. The gritty stories we fashion, tell ourselves, and share with each other hold precious truth worth passing down.

Ibuprofen and Aging

The ibuprofen story began in 2013, a year after I joined Dr. Brian Kennedy’s lab at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. At that time, I had embarked on a new project involving a novel path to the discovery of drugs that slow aging. While the strategy follows a common path in aging research – using non-vertebrate models to discover genes and compounds that extend lifespan and health span, and then testing their relevance to mammalian aging, this project had a significant difference: we employed the discovery method in collaboration with Dr. Michael Polymenis at Texas A & M University.

Dr. Polymenis’ focus centers on cell cycle and growth control in yeast, while our lab’s focus centers on yeast aging. There are a number of reasons why we use yeast as an animal model to study aging. First, yeast are unicellular eukaryotic (a nucleus and other organelles enclosed within membranes) organisms with a relatively short lifespan, which allows us to run experiments quickly. Second, it has a relatively small genome, and it was the first eukaryote to be completely sequenced and mapped, as well as being the only organism to have its entire genome deleted gene by gene. Third, the metabolic and regulatory mechanisms of yeast are highly conserved within higher eukaryotic systems. A large portion of genes in yeast have been shown to have similar genes in higher eukaryotes that have been implicated in aging related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and cancer. Lastly, yeast are inexpensive to work with at large scales, and we can take advantage of a large number of powerful pre-existing tools and datasets for these simple organisms. Recently, the Kennedy lab, in collaboration with Dr. Matt Kaeberlein’s lab at the University of Washington, completed a lifespan screen of about 5,000 individual yeast strains. Each of these strains had one single gene deleted from its genome. The goal of this research was to find out which gene deletion can extend lifespan in yeast. We found that most of the genes, when deleted, had either no effect or shortened the lifespan. There are only 200 genes in the yeast genome where their deletion leads to a longer lifespan. We refer to those genes as long-lived deletions. When Dr. Polymenis compared the cell cycle and lifespan properties of yeast deletion strains, he found a strong correlation between long-lived deletion strains and those that had a specific set of cell cycle properties.

So here is the observation: long-lived deletions have something in common in their cell cycle properties. Even though we don’t know why, we can still take advantage of this observation. One idea that we came up with was if we can find drugs that can change cell cycle properties of normal yeast to exactly match long-lived deletions, these drugs might also make yeast live longer. So we did a large-scale screen of FDA approved commercially available drugs to test whether those drugs can evoke a similar set of cell cycle properties. Finally, 14 drugs were selected from the screening, including ibuprofen. It almost gave everyone a heart attack when we saw ibuprofen was on the list. Ibuprofen is a safe, over the counter medication. It is on the WHO list of ‘core’ drugs. Moreover, ibuprofen has never been linked to aging pathways, making this a significant discovery.

If our hypothesis is correct, ibuprofen should extend yeast lifespan. And the results confirmed our hypothesis: ibuprofen extends replicative lifespan by about 17% in yeast. Replicative lifespan is counted cell divisions. A yeast cell divides 25-26 times, on average, before it dies. Yeast cells on ibuprofen divide a little over 30 times, on average. More importantly, the drug also extends lifespan in worms and fruit flies, which are multi-cellular, complex organisms compared to yeast. So the next question we had to ask was, how does ibuprofen extend lifespan? Interestingly, yeast and worms don’t have cyclooxygenase, which is the target of ibuprofen in humans. But yeast and worm cells do need the amino acid tryptophan. Cells prefer to import tryptophan from the environment. In yeast, we found that ibuprofen interferes with tryptophan import by destabilizing the machinery that brings tryptophan inside the cell. This seems to be the critical function of ibuprofen for extending longevity in this organism. Inhibiting the analogous import machinery in worms also extends their lifespan. One thing we noticed is that ibuprofen also makes cells divide slightly slower than they would otherwise. In that regard, ibuprofen mimics the effect of many pro-longevity genetic mutations in yeast.

But there are open questions. For example, is it low tryptophan amounts inside the cells that extend lifespan (perhaps akin to dietary restriction), or is the mechanism related to the import machinery itself? So, we have more work to do. Right now, it is still hard to predict if ibuprofen will ever be used as an anti-aging medicine in humans. Nonetheless, one very exciting aspect of our study is that existing and fairly safe drugs, such as ibuprofen, are worth looking at further. As a proof of principle, our study supports the idea that drugs in common use may have unexpected, useful properties. We just need more research to examine and understand these properties better before anyone can say whether they might be applicable to people.

Tips to Help Couples Communicate More Effectively

Have you been thinking about and even worrying about the upcoming years—and your spouse wants nothing to do with it and thinks you’re “crazy” to be thinking about something in the future? Or, perhaps your spouse is pushing for the discussion and you don’t even want him or her to consider retiring since it will upset the balance in your life. If so, you’re not alone.

Many couples are not on the same page when it comes to talking about retirement. There may be differences about if, when and how to retire as well as life-style issues. Even the concept of retirement is undergoing change—we’re living longer and many people don’t want to retire and/or realize that they can’t afford to retire so they don’t outlive their money. “Retirement” is still the term people use—but it’s often more helpful to think about retirement as a process, transition or journey—it’s no longer a destination.

Some people want to stay in their current job and others want to retire from their current work, and want to use their skills in another way, such as an encore career, project or temporary work. Still others may have been “retired” from their current position by downsizing and want or need to work but find it difficult to find another job.

In addition, there are now many dual career couples. It’s not unusual to be “out of synch” with your spouse. Some women started to work later and are in their prime when their husband/partner is ready to “wind down.” You may have different dreams, goals and priorities from your partner and there may be differences in your ages and/or health related issues. In addition, women don’t necessarily want to live their husband’s retirement dream. They want their retirement years to include some of their own dreams.

People may also differ regarding where to live as well as how they view responsibilities and obligations for children, grandchildren and other family members. Some people are in long term relationships and others are in newer relationships—with children together or separately or no children and grandchildren. It can feel complicated and overwhelming, especially if you’re not sure conversations will be helpful and productive.

It’s a myth that getting older is “all downhill”—it can be an exciting and fulfilling time of life. It is less important what you’re retiring from and more important to think about what you’re retiring to. We’ve learned from positive psychology that well-being is a combination of feeling connected and engaged as well as feeling a sense of purpose and meaning in life.

Here are some suggestions about how to have some of these important but difficult conversations with your partner, but also with other people who are important in your life.

• Start with what is called an “I” statement, where you share what you’re thinking about or feeling.
• Avoid what are called “you” statements which, too often, can be experienced as blaming or shaming. If you feel attacked or judged there is a normal tendency to shut down or become defensive and then mount a counterattack which is not conducive to good communication!
• Practice what is called “active listening.” Many of us have a tendency to listen to the first few words and then tune out—either thinking about our responses or already starting to interpret what we’re hearing. You may be right in your assumption of what you think you are hearing—but you could be equally wrong.
• A helpful technique is to listen, and before you respond to repeat back what you literally heard. This gives your partner an opportunity to say that you did hear well—or to clarify whatever areas you seem to have missed. This also gives you an opportunity to think before you respond so you can think about what you want to say rather than just react.
• Appreciate what you’re hearing, even if you don’t agree. Sometimes a simple question such as: “Help me understand why that’s so important to you” can go a long way.
• If you’re not used to talking together, or you know this will be a difficult conversation, set a time limit—it can be as short as 5 or 10 minutes since you can always come back to the conversation at a later time.
• Decide where you want to talk. For some people it’s good to talk at home. Others prefer to talk in a restaurant, when you’re taking a walk or even when you’re in the car driving together.
• Avoid Distractions. Be sure to turn off your phones, computers and TV during your conversation.

It’s important to create space for the “we” of the relationship which will help you move from polar opposite positions toward an opportunity for problem solving and compromise for the sake of the relationship. Staying stuck in positions fosters a win vs lose dynamic which can lead to resentments.

Try to think of a win: win paradigm—in which some of what you both want and need is respected. If you find yourself at an impasse, it’s often helpful to agree to come back to the conversation later, when you’ve each had time to think about what your partner has been saying. In addition, if you can’t get past the impasse, consider talking with a coach or therapist who may be able to help you understand where you get “stuck” in the conversation and help you find alternative ways to deal with the differences.

We have the gift of 20, 30 or more “bonus years” past the traditional retirement age of 62 or 65. Embrace these years and find ways to live more consciously and intentionally in this next stage of life. Open to new possibilities and new ways to connect with your partner. Remember, what’s most important is to think about what you want to retire to.