For most of her life she was a letter writer. Proper letters, in envelopes, with stamps. She understood instinctively what so many people miss, that staying connected to the people you love across distance takes deliberate effort, and that effort is always worth making. Her letters went out regularly to family and friends scattered across the country, and she treasured the ones that came back. Connection by correspondence was simply part of who she was.
Which makes what happened next all the more painful.
My aunt was a sharp, curious woman who lived a full and connected life for most of her years. She had opinions, she had stories, and she had family scattered across the country who loved her. What she didn’t have, for far too long, was any way to reach them easily from her own home. She could have used the telephone but for most of her life long distance calls were very expensive. As a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s wife she was frugal. Long distance phone calls were for emergencies or very important calls only.
That changed, briefly, in the final year of her life. Someone gave her a tablet in the nursing home and showed her how to send emails. She took to it immediately, the way curious people always do when someone takes the time to show them something properly. She emailed family. She received emails back. For a short time that small glowing screen was a window back into the world she had been increasingly cut off from.
It was too little, too late.
What kept her away from that connection for so many years wasn’t stubbornness or indifference. It was fear. Specifically it was fear planted by a well intentioned public forum she attended years earlier, run by the RCMP, in which the entire session was devoted to warning attendees about the dangers lurking online. Scams. Predators. Identity theft. Privacy violations. The message, delivered by people in uniform that she trusted completely, was clear. The internet was a dangerous place and sensible people should think carefully before venturing into it.
She thought carefully. And she stayed away.
I don’t blame the RCMP. The dangers they described were and are real. Seniors are disproportionately targeted by online scams and the statistics are genuinely alarming. Their intentions were good. But somewhere between the intention and the delivery, the message shifted from be careful online to stay away entirely. For a woman who trusted authority and took warnings seriously, that was enough.
The cost was years of unnecessary isolation from the people and communities she would have loved to be in contact with.
I’ve thought about her story often since Marilyn and I started Canadian Senior Moment. In fact sitting down to write this piece made me realize something I hadn’t fully articulated before. My aunt was part of the reason we built it. Not consciously perhaps, but somewhere in the back of our minds we knew there were thousands of Canadian seniors exactly like her. Curious people. Connected people at heart. People who had been scared away from something that could genuinely enrich their lives by warnings that emphasized the danger without offering a safe alternative.
The internet does have dangerous corners. Nobody is pretending otherwise. But it also has the ability to connect a grandmother in rural Nova Scotia with her grandchildren in British Columbia in real time. It has communities of people who share your interests, your memories, your sense of humour and your stage of life. It has daily reminders that you are not alone, that your stories matter, and that there are people out there who want to hear them.
What Canadian seniors needed … what my aunt needed … wasn’t a warning to stay away. She needed a safe, welcoming, specifically Canadian place to start. Somewhere built by people who understood the hesitation, respected it, and designed around it. Somewhere without the drama and the algorithms and the misinformation that makes platforms like Facebook so exhausting. Somewhere that felt like it was actually built for them.
That’s what Canadian Senior Moment is trying to be.
We don’t always get it right. We’re still building, still learning, still figuring out what our community needs. But every time someone joins the Gathering Place and posts their first comment, or replies to the newsletter to say one of our stories reminded them of their own childhood, or simply emails to say they look forward to opening our newsletter every morning, we think of her.
She would have loved it here.
