Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Joel Klein, 78, gave us a thoughtful memoir of the clerkships he served with two prominent judges 50 years ago. This week, Maureen Ebel, 77, describes losing her life savings in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme—and how she learned to “play the hand you’re dealt.”
When people used to ask me if the worst day of my life was when I learned that Bernie Madoff had been running a Ponzi scheme, my answer was always no.
It’s true that I had invested all my funds with Madoff over the years, and it was devastating to learn that that money, which I had always assumed would carry me for the rest of my days, was gone. But the worst day of my life had come eight years earlier, in 2000, when Marc, my husband of 27 years, died because of a medical mistake.
We had met when Marc was a young resident and I was an emergency room nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital. We were young when we started dating, and as I think back on it, we grew up together as we built our life as a couple. We used to pinch ourselves sometimes at how lucky we were. We had very little money, but we worked hard and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. In time, Marc built a thriving gastroenterology practice, and we owned a home in Pennsylvania and a condo in Florida. We had good friends in both places, with lots of tennis and traveling and activities. We also loved just being alone in each other’s company.
Marc was only 53 when he died. I was broken—truly shattered—and it took me years, and a lot of counseling, to climb out of that hole. One person who stepped forward to help was Marc’s uncle, who began offering me advice about what to do with the money my husband and I had accumulated during our long marriage. We had most of it in mutual funds and bonds, but I was open to suggestions about other alternatives.
