New Ideas About Getting Older

Cess 76, Dave 82

Two days before my husband, Ken, died we took a little joy ride in my son-in-law's yellow convertible.  Ken was no longer able to speak but he loved the ride.  So did I.

Of course, if he'd been in a nursing home or the hospital, that would never have happened.  Nor would he have been allowed to eat cake every morning for breakfast, which he did up until the time he stopped eating altogether.

But I had to fight lots of rules and even break a few to make this happen.

There's a new movement afoot challenging the way older people's decisions get made.  Mainly, some of us think that we should get to make them ourselves.

I'll be leading a discussion class on this subject soon using Dr. Atul Gawande's excellent book Being Mortal - Medicine and What Matters Most in the End.   Following are a few quotes from the book.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them....Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. 

As I pass a decade in surgical practice and  become middle-aged myself, I find that neither I nor my patients find our current state tolerable.

There is arguably no better time in history to be old.

...for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence-all but the past couple of hundred of years-the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. 

This is what it means to have autonomy-you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

I'm anticipating a rich discussion.


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