Category Archives: Aging with Grace and Grit
Why didn’t someone think of this before? Lights on walkers may cut falls Forget driving in the dark — sometimes it’s dangerous just walking in the dark. As the population ages, medical teams are responding to more calls from people who have fallen in the night. Many are from older adults who toppled over their [...]
Last week I wrote Life Imitates Art, this week there is a much finer piece in The Boston Globe about the situation facing Sandra Day O’Connor called A love supreme finds space in dementia. So this, in the end, is what love is. Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, [...]
Or maybe creative people have a greater sense about what’s in the air. Justice O’Connor’s husband forms romance with fellow Alzheimer’s patient. Last week I watched Away From Her, a movie starring Julie Christie as Fiona who, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, decides she would be better off in a retirement home than with her husband [...]
Ronni Bennett over at Time Goes By has posted a two-part interview with Dr. William Thomas, a young geriatrician and author of What are Old People For? “What Are Old People For?: How Elders Will Save the World” (William H. Thomas) Here is one excerpt. We human beings live a long time after our reproductive [...]
Grandmother celebrates 100th birthday by becoming world’s oldest paraglider. “I was sitting in a chair floating above the mountains. I’m not scared at all. “I love heights, I love climbing, I love getting up in the air. I hope to do this again when I am 105, but this might be my final goodbye to [...]
Civic Ventures, a think tank founded in the late 1990s is “reframing the debate about aging in America and redefining the second half of life as a source of social and individual renewal” It’s about “helping society achieve the greatest return on experience.” They begun a number of programs including the Experience Corps, a national [...]
Just about everyone in Australia knows Olive. She’s the blogger who is turning 108. Three cheers for Olive! You can watch her sing My Blue Heaven on YouTube and hear her tell stories as well.
Mona Shaw reached her breaking point, then reached for her hammer and so lived out what most of us only fantasize about. Taking a Whack Against Comcast The insulting idea that, as Shaw puts it, “they thought just because we’re old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone.” So, after [...]
The best thing to keep normal, aging brains sharp is physical exercise which seems to help the brain as much as the body. And you want a ‘bushy’ brain not a ‘twiggy’ one. A healthy brain is a bushy one. Branch-like tentacles extend from the ends of the brain’s cells, enabling them to communicate with [...]
About three weeks ago, the chef at a nursing home in England brought in a video games console, the Nintendo Wii, that belonged to his son so that the staff could play it on the weekend. But once the residents, ages 80-103, got a gander at the console, they were so enthralled they demanded the [...]
