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Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ who fished for nearly a century dies aged 105
- havaloc 9mo agoIt always seems it's a fall that ends it, I wonder if she could have made 100 years on the water if she hadn't fell. What an inspiring life!
- Aeolun 9mo agoIt’s not the fall. It’s the enforced idleness afterwards.
- interloxia 9mo agoI sometimes wonder if VR is ever successful, perhaps in the 2050s, some of the idleness will be less of an issue. The lack of movement rather than rich stimulation might remain the issuem I look forward to a study if there hasn't been one yet.
- zdragnar 9mo agoMuscles atrophy without consistent activity. VR can't replace that for someone with a broken hip / leg / spine. The whole cardiopulmonary system weakens with age, as does the immune system and healing takes longer, so an injury from a fall is much harder on the body than an equivalent injury to a younger person.
- interloxia 9mo agoThe comparison is between active VR participation (not simply watching TV in VR) and passive activities like crosswords during the recovery period of reduced mobility.
- bell-cot 9mo agoOld family wisdom - "People fall at every age. But getting back up gets harder every year, and the time comes when you can't."
- hackeraccount 9mo agoYeah. My Grandmother lived a pretty long time but she had a boarder named Lillian who at 95 was still walking 2 or 3 miles to the store every day. One day her daughter gave her a lift and managed to get into a fairly minor accident. (My Dad claimed that the daughter was herself too old to be driving.) Anyhow Lillian broke an ankle. Went to hospital. And there was some complication. And then another. And 2 weeks later she's passed away, never having gotten out of the hospital. I think people - especially when you're old - are more like sharks then not. If you don't keep moving nothing good happens.
- somenameforme 9mo agoIt's the senescence that makes the fall, more or less, inevitable. Warren Buffet wrote about it in his final letter to shareholders [1] : "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood." [1] - https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/nov1025.pdf https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/nov1025.pdf
- dayyan 9mo agoRugged individualism. Rest in peace, Queen.
- dostick 9mo agoWho else reading the headline thought it’s about 100 year old lobster that died?
- innis226 9mo agoLol me too
- anon-tiled-bug 9mo ago[flagged]
- GuestFAUniverse 9mo agoSo Long, and Thanks for All the... Lobster.
- Ronsenshi 9mo agoShe must have had so many interesting stories to tell. Such an amazing experiences - born in the early 1920s, being a young adult at the beginning of the Second World War, seeing mass commercialization of air travel, flight to space, miniaturization and age of information. And she even caught beginnings of AI (or pseudo-AI). She "picked" a good place to live and observe the flow of time and events where she directly wouldn't be affected by various negative events throughout the century of her life.
- julian_t 9mo agoSome people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.
- frereubu 9mo agoWhen my family moved to Somerset from London in the 1970s our elderly next-door neighbour, after hearing we'd moved from London, said "I went to Bristol [25 miles away] once. Didn't like it much." Apart from that he'd stayed in the town we'd moved to. I think about that a lot and sometimes envy his contentment in staying where he was - he had everything he needed.
- nashashmi 9mo agoI grew up watching movies where it was common for the character to be living as adults in the town they were born in, and sometimes even in the very house they were born. As an immigrant, I thought this was a missed opportunity. In my head this is what it means to be a local. My wife on the other hand has been migrating for so long that she has no ties to any land. Not of her forefathers which she has never been to. Not of her grandfather which she also has never been to. Nor of her fathers given that he hates the place. still has longing for the land of her childhood but she is not allowed to go back to. And now she is here, too detached to continue to live in the same place as us.
- inglor_cz 9mo agoI wonder if there is a lobster that survived her. Lobsters are long-lived, they don't age (in the sense of slowly losing their fitness - senescence) and they only die when they grow too big and suffocate during moulting, or possibly catch some infection, or get killed by other animals/people. A 105 y.o. lobster is plausible.
- nephihaha 9mo agoEarly reports by European colonists in New England suggest some of the lobsters back then were far bigger than today.
- linksnapzz 9mo agoMy grandpa said that it was not unusual to see 5-10pounders crawling around in the shallows at night...in the 1920s, in Narragansett Bay, not even offshore.
- Gracana 9mo agoI went looking for information on the oldest known lobster, and found this article about a 20lb lobster named George who was estimated to be 140 years old. Neat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_(lobster) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_(lobster)
- ulf-77723 9mo agoThe article states that a raising amount of people in the US still work, albeit their age and it feels a little strange to me. Ginny, probably got so old because she was working and had a purpose every day. Being 100 and still capable of working is a blessing
- bell-cot 9mo ago> Being 100 and still capable of working is a blessing A much under-appreciated blessing. At any age. Over the past half-ish century, I've visited any number of elderly relatives and friends who were living in the US's long-term care facilities. However bright the decor, or kind the care staff - there is a very bleak "people whose ability to do anything useful has died, waiting for the rest of death" aura to them.
- parpfish 9mo agoOver my life I have learned “you must be useful to be valued” and I’m desperately trying to unlearn it. Reason one is that I should learn to chill out and relax. Reason two is that I know old age will hit me very hard once I feel “useless” and I should prepare for that
- kakacik 9mo agoPeople can be properly useful till their last moment. Caring friend, loving reliable family member - those mean endlessly more than some senior position in some corporation that come and go and with enough distance to see things are mostly meaningless. You don't need to rewire your core, just look things from right perspective.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9mo agoWhy not learn how to catch lobsters?
- bell-cot 9mo agoYes. But there is a very long and winding gray spectrum between a belligerently entitled layabout, and "your daily work output no longer excuses your continued consumption of our oxygen, meatbag".
- GeorgeOldfield 9mo ago[flagged]
- SpaceL10n 9mo agoIt's an amazing feat worthy of sharing?
- nephihaha 9mo agoIt says she died at 105 and spent almost a century fishing for lobsters. I doubt she was catching many at the age of five.
- defrost 9mo ago* Fishing's not catching, * I just pulled up a family video of several kids, mine, my siblings, friends, making commercial marbles for sale pulling glass from a furnace and rolling them on a bench, using optic moulds, canes for decoration, etc .. at the age of five. Sure, we weren't running them like chimney sweeps or coal mine donkeys 24/7 - that's what they wanted to do for pocket money - make their own, how ever many, and sell them.
- nephihaha 9mo agoI doubt she was doing much in this direction until at least the age of eleven and even then...
- defrost 9mo agoI can't say either way, having never met her. I can say that Sandy over the road (now deceased, made it to 94) was hitching bullocks to sled a water tank to a spring and back every morning setting out at 4am from the age of five or so - both his parents died of influenza just a few years later. My own father, (still alive, born 1935) was shooting and trapping rabbits at that age to feed the family.
- barry-cotter 9mo agoDepressing to realise that soon most people will not even have second hand experience with children being useful.
- cucumber3732842 9mo agoIn the days before OSHA there was a lot of stuff on a lobster boat an 8yo can be tasked with.
- deleted 9mo ago
- JoeAltmaier 9mo agoI just lost my Mom, at 97. We would go to lunch on Tuesday and then grocery shopping. She'd talk of the family and where they all were and what they were doing - it was MY day to catch up. The last Tuesday we got back and she said "That was too hard. I think that was the last one." I agreed, and thought I'd call her next tuesday just the same and see if she'd changed her mind. But there was no 'next tuesday'. Anyway, life is a gift and I miss her and Tuesday doesn't come but I feel the gap.
- world2vec 9mo agoI'm so sorry.
- gwbas1c 9mo agoThey seem to know. After my mother passed, I found an old essay talking about when her father (my grandfather) passed. She wrote that the last time we saw him, he seemed to know something was up, and then died that night. My other grandfather figured it out after a blood test determined that he only had a few days left. His kids (including my dad) weren't going to tell him. He was 102 and otherwise healthy. Then, he wheeled himself across the nursing home into the meeting with the social worker, and announced the funeral home, church, and cemetery that his arrangements were with. He had such a big smile too. He "won" and couldn't ask for anything more.
- complianceowl 9mo ago[dead]
- franktankbank 9mo agoBeautiful really. I feel you, there is something about hearing stories from those close to you that hit 100x harder. I have cousins who keep these memories alive by digging into our far past family trees and document it for the rest of us.
- hdjdjfjb 9mo ago[flagged]
- petcat 9mo ago> Some regard stories such as that of Oliver, who came to be known as her state’s “Lobster Lady”, as evidence of the growing number of Americans who extend their working days well past the typical retirement age as the cost of living in the US has soared, wages have stagnated and many therefore have been unable to save. It's unfortunate that this publication decides to go hard on politics no matter what the feel-good story behind the article is. This Ginny lady clearly said that she loved banding lobsters and wanted to do it for as long as she could. It had nothing to do with working into her old age because she needed the money. Obviously that is a real issue, but has nothing to do with this story. I like this news website better: https://www.positive.news/ https://www.positive.news/ At least it doesn't try to snipe me into feeling bad, or scared about everything.
- VWWHFSfQ 9mo ago> At least it doesn't try to snipe me into feeling bad, or scared about everything. That's the guardian for you. They can't write an article without making sure the reader comes away feeling like a piece of shit. This piece should just be a celebration of Ginny's remarkable life, but they'll still make sure that you know that there are kids starving in Africa and elderly people working past retirement because they have no money. I also love positive.news, and I subscribe to their newsletter. It's great.
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- kiliantics 9mo agoI took a boat ride in Maine on a lobster boat once that was owned and operated by a man in his 90s. Someone else in the town told me that he was being pressured to stop working by his family because he had recently fallen out of the boat while lobstering alone and broken a rib. He still managed to climb back into the boat with his injury and get home. It's a different America up there.
- kadushka 9mo agoCan you imagine writing code for 100 years?
- kravosdonna 9mo agoI was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a year ago at the age of 67. For several months I had noticed tremors in my right hand and the shaking of my right foot when I was sitting. My normally beautiful cursive writing was now small, cramped printing. And I tended to lose my balance. The neurologist had me walk down the hall and said I didn't swing my right arm. I had never noticed! I was in denial for a while, as there is no history in my family of parents and five older siblings, but I had to accept I had classic symptoms. I was taking amantadine and carbidopa/levodopa and was about to start physical therapy to strengthen muscles. I used different supplements that didn't work, so last July, I tried the PD-5 protocol—the best decision ever! My tremors eased, my energy returned, and I sleep soundly. I feel like a new woman, and I can walk and exercise again. I got the PD-5 from www. limitlesshealthcenter. com