Month: November 2025

• Private jet companies are competing for clients who have it all with extravagant perks.
• It’s some of the most lavish marketing on the planet, from luxury trips to swanky suites at sporting events.
• Here’s a look inside the exclusive world of private aviation — and the benefits that come with it.

On a Thursday afternoon this spring, a few dozen well-heeled travelers descended via helicopter to the Rosewood San Miguel de Allende, a five-star hotel in central Mexico. Rooms at the hotel typically cost four figures a night.

Over the course of the weekend, the group went horseback riding and tequila tasting; on the final night, they enjoyed a private fireworks display.

All of it was complimentary — except the flights, which cost anywhere from $7,000 to $23,000 an hour for clients of Flexjet, a fractional ownership company that is sort of like a (very expensive and very fancy) timeshare for private aviation.

The trip, Flexjet’s Chairman Club event, is one of the perks you get for dropping at least six figures a year on a jet program. Other destinations have included Anguilla and Lake Como.

Flexjet and other private jet operators are touting wine tastings at vineyards not typically open to the public, suites at a Formula 1 Grand Prix and the Super Bowl, facials at 40,000 feet, and menus created by top chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa. Think of it as some of the most luxurious marketing on the planet.

Over the past five years, the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals has ballooned more than 70% to 510,810, according to wealth intelligence firm Altrata. Last year, that group spent nearly $30 billion on private jets and yachts.

That influx of capital, a new class of customers who ditched commercial airlines during the pandemic, and membership models — such as NetJets, Flexjet, and VistaJet — that make private aviation more accessible mean more people are flying private than ever before. From June to August, fractional jet usage increased 70% over the same period in 2019, according to data from Aviation Week.

To attract those customers, jet operators are spending more than ever on lavish benefits — a tough sell, given that most potential clients can afford anything they’d want.

“We give them something they never want to get rid of,” Matteo Atti, the CMO of VistaJet’s parent company, Vista Global, told Business Insider of the membership perks.

Basically, once you get used to watching the Yankees from the Legends Suite or your dog gets used to drinking water with natural flower essences while at altitude — one of the many benefits of the VistaPet program — it can be hard to go back.

And in the competitive world of private jet operators, what one company does, another must one-up.

“It’s like the gladiators going after each other,” Doug Gollan, the founder of Private Jet Card Comparison, told Business Insider.

Old school marketing tactics, on steroids

The No. 1 reason people fly private is simple: To get from point A to point B. A recent survey of more than 500 private jet users conducted by Private Jet Card Comparison, a guide and advisory service, found that more than 67% of users said door-to-door time saving was the reason they flew private.

But the extras have always been part of the fun.

Twenty-five years ago, jet companies offered access to Billy Joel concerts or the Super Bowl, Gollan said. Now, much like with premium credit cards, those benefits are bigger and better than ever.

It all comes down to two pretty simple marketing goals: acquisition and retention.

Typical marketing, whether a billboard or a targeted ad on Instagram, is unlikely to persuade someone to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone millions. Almost all private jet customers come through word-of-mouth, and when an existing client brings a friend to NetJet’s VIP Art Basel experience in Miami or on a trip to Bordeaux to visit vineyards with VistaJet, that’s an instant connection.

As Gollan said, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

Then there’s the retention element.

“This is belonging to a club,” Michael Silvestro, a co-CEO of Flexjet, told Business Insider, adding that event-based experiences have been particularly successful. “You expect a certain level of amenities and service.”

The bells and whistles can help keep a customer’s eye from wandering, especially when a competitor is laying down the sales pitch thick. They can also be a spoonful of sugar to help with the undeniable medicine of flying. Even on a private jet, there can be air traffic delays or mechanical issues.

Tickets to the Masters or a stay at a luxury resort “takes the edge off when something goes wrong,” Gollan said.

A change in frequent flyers

If youth is wasted on the young and perks are wasted on the rich, then the new private jet customer gets the best of all worlds.

Over the last decade, the average age of those who fly private has decreased.

“It’s not just for people who have made it, it’s for people who are making it,” Atti said.

And people who are making it prioritize experiences, whether it’s access to the Royal Ascot with Flexjet or pampering during a flight.

In general, younger generations are fueling a surge in the luxury experience sector. Last year, it was the fastest-growing of all luxury segments, according to a report by Bain, with a 5% uptick in spending. Luxury products, on the other hand, saw a 2% decrease in spending.

“They value the journey more than the thing,” Silvestro said of Flexjet’s younger customers.

A group of 40-somethings going on a trip won’t meet at the destination; they will get the party started on the tarmac, where a private car will take them directly to the plane, and the flight crew will greet them with Champagne and caviar. On the way home, the wellness-obsessed generation will eat a nutritionist-approved beet carpaccio, breathe in designer aromatherapy, and sit in ergonomically optimized chairs.

To be sure, some distinguish between extravagance and excess.

“People don’t want to pay through the nose to get that added perk,” said Tony Theis, VP at private aviation consultancy Central Business Jets. “For some people, traveling is just, I just need to get from A to Z.”

Ask any executive at one of these private jet companies, and they’d say that someone in it for the utilitarianism isn’t their target customer — but they also know that at the end of the day, a box at Wimbledon or special access to the Mayo Clinic can only go so far.

“You are spending hundreds of thousands, millions to join,” Gollan said. “No dinner with a chef makes sense if you join the wrong program.”

Taylor Rains contributed reporting.

I started fantasizing about moving to New York when I visited the city at the age of 16. I fell in love with the buzz, the jagged skyline, and the passion that seemed to fill every New Yorker I met.

In my teenage fantasies, I daydreamed about walking through Central Park, frequenting Broadway shows, and eating bagels whenever I wanted. So, when I was accepted into a publishing graduate program at New York University at the age of 22, I was overwhelmed with a sense of exhilaration. It felt like everything I wanted for my career was falling into place.

When it was finally time to make my move from Atlanta to New York in 2017, I did everything I could to prepare. I painstakingly packed cardboard boxes to the brim with books and keepsakes, and I arranged for an Ikea bed to be delivered to my new StuyTown apartment on the exact day I arrived. I convinced my family to fly with me the two hours to the Big Apple so they could help me drag about five suitcases full of my entire world to my new home.

I couldn’t wait to start my new life. Still, when I walked into my apartment for the first time, giddily greeting my roommate — a friend from college who was also attending NYU — and taking in our new home, there was a quiet, anxious voice that started in a whisper but had grown louder now that I was settling in: What if I wasn’t cut out for New York? Could I afford life in New York City? How would I get around without a car? What if I didn’t make any friends? Could I even get a job after school? What if I couldn’t figure out the subway?

To my 22-year-old self’s relief, I discovered I was cut out for New York. I found I didn’t miss driving at all as I wandered through NYC, learned not to buy a haircut from a stranger on the street, and made friends. After I graduated from NYU, I became a reporter at Business Insider. I even met my husband on a wintry night in Manhattan, and we’re now the proud parents of our 3-year-old rescue dog, Rory. After more than eight years, New York is my home.

I’ve built a life that is, in some ways, exactly like the one I had dreamed of — but it hasn’t always been easy. In fact, that first year in New York was particularly challenging. I locked myself out of my apartment more times than I care to admit, held back tears the first time my paper grocery bag ripped open on the sidewalk, and smiled stiffly through awkward social interactions until I found friends I could really be myself around.

Relocating is daunting, no matter how much you want it.

In 2024, Business Insider connected with three people about to take the same leap of faith I did all those years ago. Althea McBride, Hayley Perry-Sanchez, and Erin Grindstaff were all set to relocate for several reasons: to pursue the dream of homeownership, achieve financial stability, or support their partners’ careers. They offered Business Insider a front-row seat to their transition, and we followed them over the course of 12 months to detail the highs and lows of relocating in a new series called “Reinventing home.”

Our monthly conversations with each of them highlighted that moving can be as stressful and unsettling as it is fulfilling and exciting. It’s part of the reason people are staying put.

James Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington, told Business Insider in 2024 that people are moving less often. With increased job opportunities closer to home and the rise of remote work, people no longer have to relocate to find their American dream.

Still, an August Business Insider survey showed that although people are moving less, it’s still on people’s minds, primarily with the hope of reaping financial benefits. We asked readers to share whether they had moved or considered moving within the past year, and if they had, why moving appealed to them. Over 1,500 people, including young professionals, busy parents, and retirees, participated in the online survey.

While some respondents had recently landed new jobs, others were unemployed or felt stuck in their careers. They hoped to move somewhere new to find better job opportunities, a lower cost of living, a more tight-knit community, or a place that could help them stretch their retirement savings as far as possible.

Regardless of their phase of life, moving seemed to be the key to unlocking the promise of prosperity for respondents in the survey. While relocating can be a dream come true for many, our conversations with McBride, Perry-Sanchez, and Grindstaff made clear that the reality of a move is often more complex than the daydream.

At times over the year, the three raved about the financial freedom their new home gave them or happily shared details about their new favorite spot in town. Other times, they felt lost as they tried to find their footing in a place that didn’t quite fit them yet.

Their stories, which you can read below, offer a glimpse at what it truly takes to reinvent home.

• Grokipedia is Elon Musk’s alternative to Wikipedia, focusing on less “woke” content.
• A lot of the non-political entries are just direct copies of Wikipedia.
• But in certain cases, Grokipedia improved the Wikipedia page — padding out information and sources.

I’ll admit I’m fairly skeptical of the results of xAI’s new Grokipedia and its mission to be an anti-woke version of Wikipedia.

And yet, after testing it out a little bit, I was surprised to find that, in certain cases, it seems better than Wikipedia.

Of course, its entries for hot-button things like “Elon Musk” or “gender” are exactly what you’d expect for its “unbiased” mission. It hurts my head to think about this too much, so I won’t linger on this.

But most pages are not hotbeds of “wokism,” so they end up almost word-for-word identical to Wikipedia. (Grokipedia is able to essentially copy from Wikipedia because Wikipedia allows itself to be scraped by AI bots). So far, Grokipedia has about 800,000 pages, whereas Wikipedia’s English-language version has over 7 million.

xAI did not respond to a request for comment on how Grokipedia pages were chosen.

For example, one of the first things I compared was the entries for the 2008 animated movie “Bolt”, where a superhero dog is voiced by John Travolta. (I had happened to look at the Wikipedia page for it while my kid was watching the movie recently.) As you can probably imagine, this isn’t a particularly political entry.

Like most movie entries, Grokipedia’s has a plot summary, some production details, a cast list, and an overview of the critical reception. (I asked ChatGPT to compare the two articles to see which had more “bias,” and in a case of AI-on-AI crime, ChatGPT accused Grok of having a pro-corporate bias by taking only Disney execs’ word on some of the elements of production. Ha!)

Where Elon Musk might be onto something with Grokipedia

After browsing around Grokipedia for a while, I came across some things that seemed particularly promising.

The types of pages where Grokipedia seemed to beat Wikipedia were the unloved, scraggly entries on Wikipedia. You know the kind — where it truly seems like a bunch of people added in a single sentence once a year for the last 15 years. Where the writing lacks cohesion, tiny details are given equal prominence alongside big facts, and the result is generally a mess.

Here’s an example of one of these. I had recently looked up the Wikipedia entry for the Dana Hall School, a fancy girls’ private school near Boston where the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner attended. The entry isn’t short, but it’s disorganized, with a lengthy “history” section that reads like a list of disjointed bullet points.

Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia’s entry, and it’s totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)

I will note that there are some unusual aspects to the entry, however. There’s a whole section that talks about the arguments for and against single-sex education and a discussion of the school’s racial diversity that has more than a whiff of an anti-DEI agenda. My head hurts again, so let’s set that aside for now.

AI might be of some help to Wikipedia

What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.

One interesting example: By clicking “Random article” on Wikipedia and searching for corresponding Grokipedia entries, I found a curious case where the two entries differ slightly.

For the case of Baroness Marie Vetsera, a woman involved in a minor 18th-century royal scandal, Wikipedia had a substantial entry. But Grokipedia’s was even longer, and formatted quite differently — and frankly, I thought it told a better narrative of the baroness’s untimely demise. But it also had some bad quirks. For example, Grokipedia used a citation for a Facebook page about royal history that seemed to be viral clickbait written by AI.

Obviously, Grokipedia is not perfect — far, far from it. But it’s an interesting idea of how AI could help to improve Wikipedia itself. It could smooth out stilted writing or pad out pages that need improving.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, recently appeared on NPR’s Open to Debate show, where he said that he’s not opposed to AI helping out. He gives an example of an editor looking at a page that needs improvement and asking AI to identify additional relevant facts in the sources already on the page. Then the editor could verify those and add them himself. Seems reasonable!

I’m not planning on switching to Grokipedia for factual information anytime soon, and I don’t recommend you do, either.

In a way, the best outcome would be for Wikipedia to observe what does or doesn’t work on Grokipedia as a sort of sandbox, and take lessons from it.

Patricia Willson, 93, stares intently at her leg as her nurse unwraps layers of bandages, revealing a scar that, to Willson’s elation, is nowhere near as gruesome as it had been months ago.

Hunched over from a fractured back, Willson scrolls through her phone to remind her nurse what the scar had looked like. Last December, she sliced her leg open on a box. A few months later, the three-inch gash got infected.

“It scared me so bad when my legs started hurting,” Willson tells her nurse, as Business Insider visited her home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, earlier this year.

“You’re a medical masterpiece,” her nurse says. “You’ve been through a lot. Did you mention how many times you’ve broken a bone?”

“Well, I’ve had 14 broken arms,” Willson replies.

As she inches back to her desk once her leg is tended to, Willson stops to clear off a stack of papers. Nestled between bills and medical records on one side of the desk sits a stapled-together printout of 50 websites for finding freelance work. Tucked away on the other side is a slightly wrinkled cover letter she’s been sending to companies.

“I really need a job,” she says under her breath.

There aren’t too many people her age looking for work, she acknowledges somberly. Willson, a mother of six, worked in payroll at companies like Pfizer before opening a home rental business in 2006, which she runs with her daughter and her son-in-law. Until four years ago, Willson was on her feet doing chores around the property; she has since become less able to perform physical tasks.

“When you don’t know what to do, you don’t do anything,” Willson says. “Things snowballed on me, and I did not foresee that things would get worse.”

She’s one of the nearly 1.4 million people over age 65 who have a disability and still work — whether by choice, like some, or by necessity, like Willson, who says that after paying all her bills, she sometimes struggles to have extra money left at the end of the month to buy a full cart of groceries.

On a recent group call AARP held about applying for jobs, Willson suspected she was the oldest there by at least a decade. With almost nothing in savings, even with Social Security, she’s spent hours each day browsing remote jobs and educating herself on what may be out there, knowing full well that most companies might not consider someone at her age.

Some nights, she says, the stress of her situation keeps her from sleeping.

“I’m worried every night when I go to bed that what I have isn’t going to last until I die,” Willson says. “For God’s sake, I should have saved every penny I could save.”

It’s a growing reality that older Americans are increasingly relying on work to make ends meet. Nearly 550,000 were working into their 80s and beyond as of 2023, according to a Business Insider analysis of 2023 Census data. That’s over 4% of the population aged 80 and above.

Of the more than 175 people 80 and older who spoke to Business Insider about working later in life, most mentioned some health issue as a challenge. Common ones included arthritis, mobility impairments, heart disease, hearing loss, and memory problems. Most of these didn’t prevent them from performing their job tasks.

A few said their conditions were severe enough that they would have retired years ago if they could have, though they need to work to pay their bills. Their health issues have led them to either struggle throughout the day or find employment where they can work around periods of pain.

For four decades, Patricia Moore, 81, has managed a gas station, earning about $36,000 a year despite suffering from neuropathy and swelling. It’s exhausting some days, but she has to work to supplement her $2,800 monthly Social Security income, as she doesn’t have sufficient savings.

“Retirement is not in the near future, as it costs more every month to just survive,” said Moore, who lives in California.

The average retirement age in the US is 62, when accounting for people who retire early because of disabilities.

Though much research shows that work prolongs people’s lives, some papers suggest that work is detrimental to longevity for those with health issues or who work in physical jobs. Research by Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at The New School in New York, suggests that working later in life benefits those who want to work — and harms those with no choice but to work, especially as mortality risks and stress levels increase.

Business Insider’s analysis of Census data found that while many of the most common occupations for Americans 80 and older are less risky, meaning lower incidences of injuries or fatalities, thousands work in higher-risk professions, such as truck driving, personal care, janitorial work, and construction. In interviews, some workers in these professions said that while they mostly enjoy the work, they worry that their health could hinder their productivity — or that working could put their lives in danger.

The entire US population is aging, too, suggesting that older people are more likely to stay in the workforce in the coming years. In a decade, estimates suggest, there will be more Americans 65 and older than below 18 — a flip of the current distribution of age, and a challenge when it comes to keeping an economy growing.

“To offset those pressures on the workforce, people who continue to work into their 80s, beyond conventional retirement ages, help the equation,” said Nicole Maestas, a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, adding that the US has already seen substantial reductions in GDP growth due to an aging population.

With fewer people available to work — and therefore fewer people paying the taxes that fund healthcare benefits — Maestas said companies and policymakers should consider “how we can take advantage of technology to complement work.”

During the pandemic, companies rushed to partner with health-based advisors and adopt more age-friendly benefits and health-related policies, said Talia Varley, managing director of global corporate advisory at the Cleveland Clinic. Workplaces are now taking more consideration into medical leave policies, physical accessibility, menopause, phased retirement policies, and disability accommodations. Still, she said, there’s much to do.

When money is tight, work takes precedence

David Hugo Barrett, 82, begins every middle and high school class he teaches with life lessons about the importance of working hard and staying out of trouble. For a few hours each day, he feels young, learning Gen Alpha slang and staying in touch with the latest tech trends.

But when he returns home each night, he’s reminded of the disabilities that have made his outlook less stable. He has lymphedema, which leads to swelling in his legs, and peripheral neuropathy, which causes nerve damage in his feet.

“People say age is nothing but a number. That’s just simply not true,” Barrett said. “Aging is not something that can be taken lightly.”

Barrett works as a substitute teacher in Maryland, having spent decades as a systems engineer and teacher. He retired in 2018 and self-published his memoir, “A Newark Childhood,” before returning to work part-time in November 2024. His wife, 74, works as a substitute teacher for elementary school students. Staying retired was not an option, he said.

“The financial part is not insignificant, and I look forward to getting those checks every two weeks,” Barrett said. “I wish I had waited until I was older to take advantage of my Social Security. In that calculation of how long I’m going to live with my 401(k), I underfunded it because I’ve lived way beyond what I expected.”

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a resident scholar at Brandeis University in Massachusetts who studies aging, said that because people’s incomes often peak in their mid-50s, it’s much harder to earn an adequate salary in later years — which keeps people employed for longer, even amid severe health challenges.

“Ethically speaking, if we had a good healthcare system in the United States that covered everybody from cradle to grave, we would have more healthy people,” she said, adding that mid-career ageism can push back people’s retirement ages. Additionally, about 26 million Americans under 65 are uninsured, so those who face medical challenges may have to work later to recover medical expenses, she said.

Jane Way, 84, wanted to continue a professional career into her retirement years despite mobility limitations. She’s been in a wheelchair for five years.

Way, who lives outside Phoenix, works remotely as the US accountant for a South African orphanage, often logging in early in the morning to accommodate the time zone difference. Everything she needs is nearby, so she considers her health issues “not a big deal.”

Way is dependent on her Social Security and paycheck to get by, as she did not expect to live to her 80s. She spent her retirement savings early, putting two grandchildren through college. Her son and grandson live with her.

“I intend to be working when I reach 100,” Way said. “We’ll see if that happens.”

Fatigue often gets in the way

Ardel Richter, 84, had a storied career in real estate sales and as a notary signing agent. But in 2022, she spiraled after a “perfect storm” of events — heightened competition in the real estate market that tanked her income, her husband’s death in a car crash, and the sale of her rental properties at a meager profit.

Now, Richter, who lives in north-central Arkansas, accepts whatever notary jobs she can find, often at a lower fee than she’d like. She estimates she makes about $685 a month. Between her $842 monthly Social Security, one remaining rental property that brings in $1,250 a month, and her notary job, she brings in just $185 over her usual expenses each month.

“Being tethered to a cellphone and/or computer isn’t freeing, but it works, as there is no way I could cope with a job with set hours,” Richter said.

Although she considers her health good, the stress of work and some minor health issues make her feel more tired. She takes calcium supplements, struggles to lift heavier objects, and finds that daily tasks take longer than they did two years ago.

“It’s a tightrope walk with no net,” Richter said. “Nor do I know how long the rope is.”

Jack Rowe, a former Aetna CEO and professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University, said the “forgotten middle,” meaning those who earn above the poverty line but not enough to live comfortably, are particularly vulnerable to a dearth of geriatricians, changes to Medicaid policy, and care worker staffing challenges. This demographic often cannot afford to quit working, which could contribute to ailments like fatigue.

Despite working for six decades in various roles, Kathy Curtis, 81, has found herself with limited savings and facing health issues.

For the past decade, Curtis has worked part-time in the office of a local water company, earning $18 an hour. Because she lives in a rural area in Northern California, where seeing people out and about is less likely, the job is “like a social event,” she said. Still, she regrets how tired it makes her feel. She gets out of breath easily, though she’s grateful her health issues of the past, such as breast cancer and blood clots in her lungs, have gone away.

Between $1,186 in Social Security and the couple hundred dollars she makes from work each month, she squeezes by, she says. Her homeowners’ insurance rose after the region’s wildfires. Her grandson lives with her and helps her out.

“I’ve never made a lot of money, but I’ve also never looked, acted, or felt like a poverty case either, even though a great deal of the time I’ve stayed just barely above poverty,” Curtis said.

Working for work’s sake

Some of those who don’t technically need to work told Business Insider that it provides something necessary: a purpose.

Clark Allan Blasdell, 81, works full-time for a nonprofit community development corporation he founded half a century ago and has no regrets about how he managed his finances. Actually getting to work, though, is much more of a feat than ever.

Two years ago, Blasdell started going blind. He lost his driver’s license, so he has to take the train or rely on others to get around. It’s been harder to stay on top of his type 1 diabetes since he regularly has to check his blood sugar levels. Still, he hopes to work until the day he dies since the extra money won’t hurt.

“I’m just hopeful that I’ll be able to keep my ears open, my eyes open, and that they’re working, and I’m trying to find somebody who can help me with this,” Blasdell said.

Andrew Crowell, vice chairman of wealth management at the financial services company DA Davidson, said that financial advisors have worked increasingly more with clients on addressing long-term care and health planning instead of waiting until health deteriorates.

“We’re actively trying to engage in those conversations when people are in their 50s and early 60s, when they’re healthy, they’re insurable, and they can be at a preferred rate,” Crowell said. “Don’t wait till you’re in your 70s and you’ve now got glaucoma or COPD. You’re not going to get the preferred premium that you would hope to,” he said, referring to Medicare supplement plans.

Optimism is the best medicine

Back in northwest Arkansas, Willson peers out the window, watching her daughter steering a riding lawn mower around her property. A groundhog stares back as she contemplates her future.

Amid the hardships of running the rental business and navigating her job search, she takes a breath. Her health seems stable for the moment, and she suspects there is light at the end of their driveway.

“Everyone thinks their situation is pretty bad, but I know there are people a lot worse than I am,” Willson said. “It’ll be OK.”

Of course, she yearns for the days of better health and financial security. She would like to have a full night’s sleep and wake up refreshed. She would like to have a more stable part-time job that gives her purpose. There’s only so much optimism someone like Willson can muster when missing a tax bill or credit card payment can have a domino effect.

But like many workers in their 80s and 90s, Willson has no desire to give up on decades of effort, even if it means being stubborn. She feels she’ll eventually find a way to make ends meet.

Willson walks cautiously down the steps to her small storage room, filled with boxes of old papers. She pulls out her mother’s Bible. In it are hundreds of annotations and notes mentioning Willson and her siblings. She flips through the pages, pauses to read her mother’s heavy cursive handwriting, then puts it back in the box. Memories from eight decades flow through her mind as she steps carefully back to her desk using a walker.

It’s moments like this, she says, that give her the will to do everything in her power to stay around a little longer.