Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Recently I attended a funeral of a woman who had lived 101 years.

It was a smaller funeral because everyone she knew that she grew up with, like her parents, her siblings, her

cousins, her friends, they were all gone. The only people left were one of her

sons was still alive and then his extended family.

She had outlived three husbands and a son and even a grandson.

And then this morning when I got up I was perusing on Facebook and I noticed how one of my high school friends was moving out of her home after 30-some years and moving into a condo because she was going through a divorce.

One of my cousins who I grew up with and who was a little bit older than me moved to West Virginia.

His wife and his parents are both dead. He still has a son in the Midwest,

but he only has friends in West Virginia, but they're very good friends and he really likes it there.

Now these examples that I just shared aren't for the reason of showing that things have gone wrong.

They're to show that life changes and the people that we travel with leave and new people come.

And if we live long enough, we'll see a lot of people come and go.

The persons that we spend the longest part of our life with, or at least could

spend the longest part of our life with, is our siblings. They're there, usually from

the beginning and they stay usually to the end. But even in these situations

there's a lot of change. We move out, they move out, we get married, they get

married, and sometimes the relationship stays close but for a lot of people

seeing our siblings isn't as often as we would like and after our parents

die it often can be much less.

So with all this change and the departure of people that we love,

are we just destined to be unhappy?

It's a good question because for some people the answer is yes.

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