In her last years, my mother said from time to time, “I’m the last leaf on the tree, and I don’t like it.”

Her brother, William “Ellis” Adams, died in his 70s; her oldest sister, Lurlene Dennehy, died in her 60s; her younger sister, Muriel Adams, died in her 50s.

Mother asked us to cancel her subscription to the Tri-City News, saying she tired of reading obituaries.

Some enter their last years with smugness that they have outlived most of their contemporaries, but my mother felt a terrible loneliness.

She was a gregarious woman with four children and eight grandchildren spread over five states. This happens now as children chart their own paths and get busy with their lives.

Her neighborhood in Toledo had changed, and her closest friends had retired and moved out west or died.

Old age is not for the faint of heart. I call my friends to chat about my latest project, and we end up talking about their surgeries or my cold that keeps hanging on.

As we enter the last weeks of this year, let’s make a commitment to “pay it forward” and encourage our children and grandchildren to do the same.

Pay It Forward is the name of a book and a movie in which the concept is that each of us does a good deed for three people without getting anything in return from those three. We merely ask each to do something good for three more people, to “pay it forward.”

Let’s pledge to implement “pay it forward” in Harlan County in the next few weeks and see what happens. Email me your stories (vbblevins@woh.rr.com), and in January, I’ll share those stories in a column.