A Blog About the Road Ahead - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

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By PAULA SPAN

“You are invited to join me on a journey into my 70s,” Judy Kugel wrote back in January 2008, when she was a mere 69.

Ms. Kugel believes in recording and reflecting on big transitions. In her 59th year, she had kept a journal in a loose-leaf binder, which she still rereads on occasion. On her next milestone birthday, updating her technology, she launched “The 70-Something Blog” and committed to posting twice a week. “I’ll let you know my triumphs and my low points,” she promised her readers.

Nearly two and a half years later, she’s still at it, writing about working for a boss who is her son’s age, struggling to digitize 45 years’ worth of photographs, and facing her own and her husband Peter’s mounting health concerns. “I think it’s a real turning point,” Ms. Kugel said when we spoke.

Of course, she felt that way at 59, too. Her 50s had been her favorite decade, and she didn’t anticipate her 60s being so swell. Yet she and Peter bicycled across much of Europe, she began studying Spanish and visited Cuba, she had a knee replaced successfully, and she continued in the job she loves. (She’s associate dean of students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Peter Kugel, who’s 80, retired five years ago from the faculty at Boston College.)

So Ms. Kugel’s 70s might prove just as adventurous. And yet, she said, “You feel that the days when you can do everything you do now — well, there are so many more behind you than ahead,” she said. “I want to accept these changes and find the same joy I’ve had all along, and it helps to write. It’s therapeutic. It’s fun.”

We talk a lot about aging hereabouts, but it’s always a boon to hear a first-person account. Ms. Kugel’s blog mixes the quotidian and the quietly dramatic; between her accounts of remodeling the bathroom and the usual ups and downs at work, we learn that Mr. Kugel is in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, able to bike around Cambridge, Mass., but not around New Zealand as he did a few years back. Ms. Kugel reports good numbers on her own blood tests a year after being given a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

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