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An Unlikely Friendship, 60 Years Apart
Erin Knauer and Chandran Kaimal participated in the Digital Life History Project at Colgate University. Here is Erin’s moving account of the strong inter-generational and cross-cultural friendship that...
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How to Fill Your Days at 95
Ever wonder what a 95-year-old might do in a day? Or how you could fill your days when you get to 95? Here’s Shana’s checklist for today, July 12, 2012: _ Dogsitting _ Reading the paper _ Weeding _...
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Two Heroic Love Stories, for these Dreamy Olympic Days
Glenn, my jolly Danish friend who happens to be in his mid-90s, just emailed to offer me his three set collection of 50 Shades of Gray. The last set he lent me, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series,...
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The Tofani’s: Keeping a Marriage Strong in the Face of Dementia
Frank and Angela are another dreamy couple with a bit of reality thrown in – dementia. Frank was 18, Angela was 22, and it was a “fairy tale” romance – love at first sight. She was wearing a red dress...
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Yo, Is This Ageist?
Everyone is talking about Clint Eastwood‘s performance at the RNC last week. The most common thing I hear is, “That was really crazy stuff he said up there, but he IS 82.” There are all sorts of...
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Caring for Joseph at the Edge of Death
Frieda and Ellie knew their father Joseph was failing. For the last week he wasn’t eating, and he was drinking very little. Thankfully, the family was together for Rosh Hashanah, the previous month,...
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Elder Exploitation; Lessons from 2 Unscammable Elders
So far this month I have heard of two elder women being targeted for scams. Contrary to what we might expect, these ladies proved unscammable. Their fast reactions contradict the findings of a new...
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Happy 2013!… Am I living in the right place?
The happy new year message (via email) from Seymour in Florida, age 95, looked a lot like those he had sent before, in response to my birthday notes and on other occasions. (For AOW or regular blog...
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A Movie Extra, at 75… thank you, Academy!
A journalist recently asked me “What are 5 reasons not to fear aging?” I could have come up with 2,013 reasons. Take this story about a former student’s grandmother, Evelyne Aronin, who, at age 75,...
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Caring for Someone? This book might help you put it in perspective
…or it might stress you out. In Richard Russo‘s new memoir, Elsewhere, he tracks his codependent relationship with his mother from his childhood to the months following her death. Richard grew up as...
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Amazing Elders
Dear readers, My deepest apologies for the three-month hiatus. In this second year since AOW was published, I have been speaking with fantastic groups of students and elders (including design students...
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The Art of Aging – Israeli Children’s Museum Exhibit
The Israeli Children’s Museum has an exhibition on aging called Dialogue with Time. How smart is that? And one of the goals is to facilitate intergenerational dialogue. As a student of mine shared, “I...
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Stories from a Nursing Assistant in Training, Part 1
The students who take “Sociology of the Life Course” at Colgate University with me, go on to do amazing things. In the next few installments, I have asked a few of these students to guest blog about...
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Autonomy and Aging
Aging Today is running a story I wrote about autonomy and aging. You can read the story here. The story is based on one of the biggest lessons I learned writing AOW and learning elder’s stories. That...
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Nursing Assistant Training Part 2: Clinical
This is the second in a three-part series written by Evan Chartier, a Colgate student spending his summer training to be a nursing assistant (CNA) and preparing to write about this for his senior...
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Hospice in Rural Kenya
This is a guest blog post from Colgate University student Michelle Van Veen, who has spent the last 4 months in Kenya (through the MSID study abroad program), where she worked with a hospice team. I am...
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Oliver Sacks Reflects on Turning 80
A well-respected professor of neurology at NYU weighs in on what it feels like to turn eighty… Most interesting for me is when people like Dr. Sacks have always been the youngest one in their...
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Ruth’s 100th Birthday Party
My daughter and I attended Ruth H.’s 100th birthday party this past weekend. It was just as she had wanted – a big white tent in her side yard, teeming with people and finger foods, and there she was,...
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The racial gap in life expectancy
We have new data on mortality and racial disparity from a report by the National Center for Health Statistics. Unfortunately, the results seem to be related to black or white racial identity only. Life...
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The Illusion of Separateness: Connections across age and generation
Robert Altman, one of my favorite filmmakers, is gone, but the idea of telling a story about interconnected lives lives on in the new novel, The Illusion of Separateness. Simon Van Booy takes this...
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