Inside Aging Parent Care

Fear of Dying

By Bill March 1st, 2012

Dead

Recently Carol and I have noted a number of media stories about how our population has a greater life expectancy than in years past. The stories talk about an aging population with more degenerative diseases, and people needing to take many steps to remain healthy into their nineties.

While there is some truth to all that, the real reason life expectancy has increased so drastically is that people are living past infancy and childhood in greater numbers. The fact is that in past centuries if a person lived past those first critical years they stood a fair chance of living a long life. The same is true today, with help from modern medicine.

“Wait!” you say, “More and more people are reaching an advanced age.” Well, yes. There are more and more …

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A Retirement Hamburger; or, the View from the Other Side

By Carol February 7th, 2012

We can solve just about any problem if we talk about it together

I heard myself saying this to Bill the other day after we had resolved a potentially serious malware attack on our computer. As I think of it, this seems to be one of the great truths of our relationship. Recently our challenges as a couple have gone a bit deeper than a computer glitch. Retirement is a momentous experience in the life of anyone who has worked almost every day of their adult life as Bill has. We both knew it would be a big adjustment but I don’t think anyone can know exactly how retirement going to impact them until it happens.

For a while things went pretty smoothly between us. Bill got a part time job, we adjusted our …

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Faust, Aging, and Caregiving

By Bill November 9th, 2011

Sunday Carol and I went to the opera. The opera was Faust by Charles Gounod, sung in French. What does an opera have to do with caregiving? In this case, there is quite a lot. If you don’t know the old German legend, the subject of many works, Faust, old, accomplished, but bored with life sells his soul to the devil for youth and knowledge.

In Gounod’s version, he is sick, isolated, and lonely as well. He regains youth and vigor from Satan, seduces the girl, kills her brother in a swordfight, the girl gets pregnant, Faust abandons her, she goes crazy and kills the baby. Sentenced to death for the murder, Faust, realizing he still loves her, tries to persuade her to escape with him, but she is too crazy. She prays fervently, achieves …

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An Ambassador from Elderland

By Carol August 8th, 2011

Mid-Twentieth Century psychologists finally began to catch up with Shakespeare when they started to explore the idea that people over the age of 21 continue to develop psychologically and emotionally. We learned that just as children and adolescents grow and change, so do adults, at least until about age 50 or so. At that point, theorists—not having gained any great age themselves for the most part—decided that that nothing much happened in later life except, of course, the mental and physical changes that we can all observe in old folks. Even Shakespeare didn’t have a very positive vision of old age.

By the time these theorists did enter old age themselves, they—having developed as the elderly do—were no longer interested in talking about psychology or theories or–as in the case of Erik Erikson–anything at …

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Driving Around with White Hair Flying

By Carol August 2nd, 2011

Many of us who worked to change sexist and racist attitudes in our younger years are finding ourselves confronting another form of prejudice now as we reach retirement age. Ageism clouds perceptions of the elderly and causes us to fear growing older. We have been taught to equate great age with disability and loss of competence–period. We tend to view the elders we know who are “still” sharp and active as lucky exceptions to the rule.

Last winter on my excursions around town I began to notice that now and then a tailgater in an over-sized pickup truck would pull out into the oncoming traffic lane and roar around me screeching up to the next stop light– where I would overtake him. This is a rare though not unheard of driving experience, but after …

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