My beautiful Grandma as a late teen or very young 20-something woman.
Last month, I shared that my grandmother passed away at the age of 98. She was born in August of 1927.
Just think about what the world was like in 1927:
- No TV in most homes
- Radio as the primary connection to the world
- Handwritten letters as the norm
- Maybe there was a telephone in her home—maybe there wasn’t
- The effects of the U.S. stock market crash would reach Denmark in the early 1930s
Now consider the changes in how we live that she experienced over the course of her life:
- Basic medicine evolving into modern healthcare
- Limited mobility expanding into mass travel
- Televisions and telephones becoming standard in most homes
- A cash-based economy growing into structured banking systems
- Cars becoming common rather than rare
And yet, despite all of that change, there’s a line where her lived experience likely stopped keeping pace with the world.
As I mentioned last month, we communicated by letter. She lived in a care facility for years, and I don’t know that she ever used a computer or owned a cellphone. When I wrote to her, I never mentioned things like online shopping—I had no idea if she would even know what “online” meant.
AI would have been completely inconceivable to her.
The other thing that makes this all the more striking to me is that Denmark is now one of the most aggressively digitized countries in the world. Government communication, healthcare, and banking are all tied to digital ID systems and email. But I suspect that entire layer of life was handled for her by others—especially once she lost her sight.
She lived through nearly a century of change—and still ended her life just outside the world we now take for granted.
May she rest in peace.
