23/08/2026
A Filipino Kid Gave Me His Last Peso, That's When I Understood This Country
I've been walking this earth for 67 years now.
Worked construction in Milwaukee for 34 of those years.
Raised two kids, buried a wife, started over more times than I care to count.
And I thought I understood people pretty well by now.
Thought I had the world figured out.
I mean, literally.
the stress, the cost, the isolation, the slow grinding down of everything that made me feel like a person.
It was killing me.
And I know there are people watching this right now who are in that exact situation.
You're 70, 75, maybe 80.
You're sitting in a house that's too big and too expensive in a country that has slowly stopped caring whether you can afford your medication.
And [clears throat] you're thinking, "It's too late for me.
I'm too old.
I missed the window.
You didn't miss anything.
The window is open".
I climbed through it at 76 and it was the best decision I ever made in my life.
better than my career choices, better than most of my marriages, and I've had three, so I've got a decent sample size.
Let me back up a little.
My name is Gerald Kowalsski.
Most people call me Jerry.
I grew up in Parma, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cleveland.
Bluecollar Polish family.
My dad worked at a stamping plant.
My mom cleaned houses.
I went to a state school, got a degree in accounting, and spent the next 40ome years doing exactly that.
I wasn't rich.
I wasn't poor.
I was that middle thing that used to exist in America where you could own a home, raise kids, retire with a pension, and not worry too much.
That middle thing doesn't really exist anymore.
At least not the way it used to.
But I caught the tail end of it.
I retired at 65 from a midsized manufacturing company outside of Akran.
I had a pension, social security, a little bit in a 401k, and a paidoff house.
On paper, I was fine.
In reality, I was about to enter what I now call the slow squeeze.
The first few years of retirement were okay.
My second wife, Donna, was still alive then, [clears throat] and we had a routine.
We'd go to the diner on Saturdays.
We'd visit the grandkids.
We'd watch Jeopardy and argue about the answers.
It was small, but it was a life.
Then Donna got sick.
Pancreatic cancer.
She was gone in 4 months.
That was 2014.
I was 70 years old, alone in a three-bedroom house in a neighborhood where I barely knew anyone anymore, and the world just sort of went gray.
I'm not going to dwell on grief because everyone who's lived long enough knows what it feels like, and words don't really capture it.
Anyway, what I will say is that the grief exposed something I'd been ignoring, which is that the math of my life was no longer working.
The house needed a new roof.
Property taxes had gone up again.
My supplemental insurance premium jumped 30% in one year.
I was spending almost $400 a month just on prescriptions, blood pressure, cholesterol, a thyroid thing, an arthritis medication that my insurance decided to stop covering...
The story continues 👇
