Is There Skilled Nursing Care? This is a question to raise when you are choosing a place to spend your final years. In fact, the question is fundamental to the issue of a secure future. Living in a retirement community will not cure your diabetes or your osteoarthritis. It will not even guarantee that you […]
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I have never seen a total eclipse of the sun and never hope to see one. Not that I never wished to, but not all my wishes have come true. This is not a complaint. A great many wonders have become true experiences, though I never had a bucket list. My life has just been […]
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Before I came to live in the retirement community, I was in my house alone a great deal of the time. I slept alone, ate alone, watched television alone, made messes and cleaned them up alone, walked alone outdoors in the afternoons. Because of covid the fewer people I saw up-close, the safer I was. […]
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A couple of years ago while consciously thinking about how to help myself grow old, I realized that it was really important to me to keep learning. This was partly recognition that learning had something to do with my brain health, and that I would need my brain when my legs were already worn […]
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I never expected to be where I am right now. I do, however, remember noticing that sometimes old age advances in sudden events. A woman is 91 and well and active; she falls and breaks a hip, and it is the beginning of the end. Because she can’t walk, she loses respiratory health and […]
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A sweet woman named Lois lived across the street from us for about ten years. She and I used to take our afternoon walk together, going all the way to the end of our road where there was a closed gate. She taught me that you have to touch the gate or you can’t claim […]
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So much has happened in the short time since I finished Helping Yourself Grow Old. I read the page proofs in defiance of my knowledge that it is nearly impossible for a writer to accurately proof-read her own work. (Our brains tend to see what we meant to say, missing little things like transposed letters.) […]
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