When I think back to graduation day in 1977, I had absolutely no clue where I would end up nearly fifty years later. Back then, I usually lived for the moment. I was raised with the expectation that I should get married and have a family, with very little focus on building a career. But as I would soon learn, life had its own journey in mind for me, bringing both beautiful surprises and unimaginable challenges along the way.

Like some of us, I was fortunate enough to attend college, provided it was within a five-hour drive from home. I chose Ithaca College, drawn to the idea of a midsize school in a true college town. A few classmates joined me there, though we lost touch over the years. I found that I enjoyed college far more than high school, and it was there that I truly started coming into my own. I made a promise to myself to participate in things I might never have the chance to do again. I became the equipment manager for the varsity baseball team, joined the concert board (where I was responsible for selecting and feeding the artists), and contributed as a photographer for the yearbook.

Academically, I gravitated toward a major that combined business with sociology and people management. I ended up in Personnel and Industrial Relations, a male-dominated field at the time. I landed an internship in the EEO department of a labor law firm and even spent a semester studying abroad in London, interning for International Telephone and Telegraph. Traveling and studying abroad remains one of the greatest highlights of my early life.

After college graduation, I had the amazing opportunity to travel out west to California and Nevada with our LHS classmate, Leslie Kaplan. We shared some incredible times, and she is so dearly missed today.

When it was time to enter the real world, my first job was in the training program at Lord & Taylor. The dress code was strict: fake pearls, stockings, and patent leather pumps. To get into personnel, you had to understand the retail business from the ground up. I enjoyed the program, but after herniating a disc in my back and undergoing surgery, I could no longer sustain the physical demands of climbing stockroom ladders and hauling heavy boxes.

But as one door closed, another opened. I landed in the personnel department of a publishing company, where I became a generalist managing recruitment, benefits, payroll, training, and employee relations. Many of us there were just starting out, and there was a wonderful camaraderie among us—especially since we earned hardly anything in the early 1980s. A year after college, I moved to Manhattan and absolutely loved it. The city was vibrant, rents were reasonable, and for the next ten years, I soaked up city life, summer shares, friendships, changing jobs, and earning my MBA at night.

I continued working in Human Resources (I’m still not sure what year it changed from “Personnel”) across various industries. While at a wine and spirits company, my college concert board experience came in handy as we sponsored concerts and set up taste-tests. But some of my most memorable moments involved traveling to remote warehouses and manufacturing plants. In the mid-1980s, I drove a Japanese rental car to our Detroit plant while they were on strike. My car ended up getting egged—not because I was management, but simply because I was driving a foreign car in Detroit!

Eventually, I moved to a consumer products company, got certified in compensation, and began managing total rewards in the US and Canada. It was here that networking really paid off, as I met two of my future bosses. From there, I spent thirteen years at Fujifilm in Westchester, managing compensation, payroll, and incentive programs nationally. A nice perk of the position was conducting site inspections for sales contests in Puerto Rico, St. John, and Aruba, and attending many US Tennis Opens—though I was always too chicken to take a ride on the Fuji blimp.

As my career grew, my personal life was falling into place, too. In 1987, a colleague at the wine and spirits company set me up on a very, very blind date. My colleague’s mother-in-law knew my future husband’s mother. As my husband, Ury, later told me, he only went on the date to appease his mom! We had sushi and ice cream, and I knew right away we were off to a good start. We spent our time biking around Central Park, playing tennis, traveling, attending theater and concerts . We were married in Short Hills, New Jersey, in 1990.

As NYC began facing a decline, I wanted out of the city. We scoured train and bus schedules so I could commute to Manhattan and Ury could commute to Bayside, New York. We settled in Great Neck, Long Island, which gave me a walkable town, an eight-minute walk to the station, and a 25-minute train ride. Just one month after we moved, our oldest son, Ian, was born. He was our pride and joy, joined five years later by our second son, Andrew.

Over the years, we were happily consumed by our boys’ activities, school teams, travel sports and community. I continued working full-time, eventually leaving Fujifilm in the summer of 2008 to join the financial services industry in the Financial District, shortly before the crash. For the next eleven years, I learned about non-tangible products and services (though a lot of it went in one ear and out the other). Because my teams and clients were global, it was a 24/7 job.

While I was juggling this demanding job, our home life began to change. Ian was in high school and Andrew in middle school when Ury’s mood and behavior started shifting. This fun-loving family man and devoted dad—who coached all the boys’ teams, ran educational technology programs, and always stayed on top of current events—began repeating questions, rearranging things, losing his sense of humor and struggling to hold a job. Our lives became chaotic. There was a lot of frustration and anger because we simply had no idea what was happening.

Finally, a therapist realized it was more than depression. Ury underwent a battery of tests and scans. The week after Ian graduated high school and Andrew was Bar Mitzvahed, we sat in a neurologist’s office and received surreal news: Ury had early-onset Alzheimer’s.

We didn’t know anyone with the disease. Ury, who was born in Israel and moved to the US at age four, had little family history, as much of his family had been killed in the Holocaust. At the time, Alzheimer’s wasn’t talked about except in the elderly. I naively expected he would just grow old and eventually end up in a nursing home, perhaps having a harmless romance because he didn’t recognize me. I was entirely clueless about what was actually coming.

Over the next few years, things declined rapidly. We tried to maintain a “normal” family lifestyle. Ury bravely participated in a double-blind clinical trial for two years, enduring injections and PET scans, knowing it might not help him but hoping it could help others in the future. Sadly, he likely received the placebo, and it didn’t slow the disease.

It was an incredibly difficult time for our sons. Ian reluctantly went off to college, burying himself in his studies and his future career. Andrew, however, was still at home, watching his dad deteriorate. For a teenager, seeing your father lose the ability to work the TV remote, lose control of his emotions, or say embarrassing things in front of friends was horrific. Andrew has a golden heart and an amazing ability to redirect his dad, but it took a massive toll on him. In his frustration, Andrew would sometimes wish his dad was fighting a more ‘traditional’ illness—something people actually understood and knew how to support, rather than a disease that left us so isolated.

Physically, Ury was still strong, which made finding care difficult. There were no programs for young, early-onset patients. Caregivers quit because of his behavior, and eventually, he had to be hospitalized. He lost the ability to walk, talk, and eat. A few days before our 26th wedding anniversary, Ury passed away.

As I approached my 60th birthday, the work environment at my finance job was becoming toxic. One day, I was on the phone with a former colleague who had become the head of compensation for a growing hospital system in New Jersey. He told me about an opportunity, and I felt I owed it to myself to explore it. I got the job, and it brought my life full circle back to New Jersey—something I never in my wildest dreams thought would happen.

I sold my Long Island home of 27 years and moved into an apartment in Edgewater overlooking the Hudson River, with views stretching from the GW Bridge to the Statue of Liberty. It was the perfect mix of being close to the city, my family, and my friends. A few months later, COVID hit. I transitioned to remote work for the hospital, and after five years, when my lease was up, my bosses agreed to let me work remotely from Florida.

I seized the opportunity. Two years ago, I moved into a brand-new active 55+ community in Port St. Lucie. I continue to work remotely for Hackensack Meridian Health, providing compensation support and managing productivity plans, flying back north for meetings and family/friend events.

While I still have my days where I get angry, lose perspective or take things for granted, I try incredibly hard now to appreciate the moments and life I have.

I am blessed with a wonderful support system of family and friends. My parents are still here, living in Fairfield, New Jersey. My sons are thriving: Ian lives in NYC running his own payment platform startup, and Andrew lives in San Diego, enjoying a work-life balance of sales management, skiing, and surfing. Even though we are miles apart, we are always there for one another, bridging the distance with frequent visits, FaceTime, and phone calls.

As for me, I am embracing this chapter. I’ve taken solo trips to Portugal and Greece, family trips to Iceland and Lithuania, traveled the US, moved twice, and taken up pickleball and a little mahjong. Along the way, I have learned the hardest but most valuable lesson: do not worry about the past, do not worry about the future, but truly enjoy the present. It’s tough, but I am getting there, and I look forward to seeing all of you next year.