A couple of weeks ago, one of the “lions” of our amateur radio club, Clay, W8JNZ, became a silent key. I won’t go into his long list of accomplishments; you can read his obituary for that. What I will say is that he did a lot for our club, and its members, and for amateur radio.
For the last couple of years, he had stopped coming to our club meetings. I think that this was mostly because he stopped driving, but I never asked. Then, I heard that he’d moved to be with his family in VA. We weren’t bosom buddies, but we were friends, and it saddened me when he disappeared.
Fortunately, Clay had family to be with. That’s not always the case, though. The AARP reports that more than 8 million adults age 50 and older are affected by isolation. They define isolation as “feeling detached physically or psychologically, or being disconnected from support groups of family, friends and community.”
The AARP considers this to be such a big problem, they have started a program called Connect2Affect to make people aware of isolation in general and their own isolation in particular. The Connect2Affect website includes resources for learning more about isolation, evaluating how isolated you might be, how to connect with others if you’re feeling isolated, and how to help others be less isolated.
It’s easy to lose touch with people. We all live busy lives these days, and when someone drops off our radar, it’s easy to forget them. But let’s not let that happen to our ham radio brothers and sisters. Here’s a few things that I’d suggest:
- Make a list of club members that may not have been to a club meeting or activity recently or who have not checked in to the club’s 2m net.
- Reach out to them and ask them if there’s any particular reason that they haven’t been to a club meeting.
- Find some way to get them involved again.
- Make sure that they know when the next club meeting is scheduled and offer to drive them if they need a ride.
- Invite him or her over to your shack to see your latest rig or homebrew project.
- Invite him or her out to lunch sometime to talk about ham radio.
Ham radio is supposed to be all about communication. Let’s keep the lines of communications open with the ham radio operators in our lives and prevent them from becoming isolated.