Wandering became a favorite activity of my grandparents, especially my grandfather as he
aged in our family home. When we noticed
my grandfather missing and couldn’t find him nearby, we would make a missing
person report to the local police, who eventually found him wandering –
sometimes almost a mile away from our home! At the time, we thought our
wandering grandfather was “senile” and forgot his way home. Nowadays with helicopter parenting, we
probably would be accused of elder neglect but my grandparents were fiercely
independent so we gave them free rein to come and go as they pleased.
Earlier this month, I
participated in a caregiver focus group, hosted by Aging 2.0 meetup, to provide
feedback on a wristwatch that also operates like a fashionable sensor/surveillance/medical
alert system to detect falls within the home or wandering from the home. I didn’t think the watch would have worked for
my grandparents, who liberated themselves from wearing watches in favor of being present and especially after developing dementia. And they would have been terribly upset if
they learned about any monitoring that might trigger a traumatic association with
Communist informants in China ,
which they had escaped so they could enjoy freedom and privacy, rights protected
under U.S.
Is the problem (dementia)
the solution (being present all the time)? Since dementia symptoms include
memory loss that seems to keep people present in time, it almost seems like dementia
as prolonged meditation (being present all the time) might keep them living
longer. Nobel Prize-winning UCSF
biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn is studying how meditation might boost telomeres and telomerase (associated with longevity),
possibly via stress reduction. I often
wonder whether my grandparents, who experienced so much trauma and loss in
their lives, remained physically fit well into their 90s because dementia was a
coping mechanism to forget their painful past and to remain present? Depression,
which adds stress to the brain, may be an independent risk factor for dementia,
and treating depression includes practices like meditation and getting more
sleep to calm brain activity.
Are you there God? (prayer is my favorite form of meditation) It’s me Wandering (in Antelope Canyon
When
my grandparents were alive with dementia, I knew little about dementia and
regarded them with a mixture of admiration (for their gutsy determination to
start over again after losing almost everything in Old China) and amusement
(for their frugality). My grandparents never
became invisible as they were surrounded by extended family members who
reminded them who they were. (In the
absence of an adequate pool of family caregivers, see Caregiver Corps Act of 2014.)
In a recent Memory Care presentation, Christina Irving, LCSW at Family Caregiver Alliance said that the
most effective intervention is our interaction and communication with someone
with dementia, focusing on the relationship or personal connection based on
emotions rather than content (just like my favorite Maya Angelou quote about “people
will never forget how you made them feel”):
·
Reassure by being present and doing things together based on
what is retained (e.g., music,
muscle memory)
·
Remain calm
·
Don’t disagree (directly) or try to reason
·
Give compliments
·
Respond to feelings
·
Use distractions
·
Avoid short-term memory questions
·
Break down all tasks
·
Respond calmly to anger, don’t contradict
Wandering in place
This month I was summoned for
jury service, which involved a lot of waiting in the courthouse so I enjoyed some
napping and summer armchair travel. I read
two funny books by cerebral Jewish authors who are 20 years apart, and write
about aging and how we are linked to one another via underwear :-)
Ladies first, or beauty
before age J. Pink
granny panties grace the cover of comedienne Annabelle Gurwitch’s latest book, I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50,
a collection of essays about being sandwiched between raising a teen and
helping elderly parents move to assisted living, taking inventory of her life’s regrets
(“I’m Meditating as Fast as I Can”), putting health problems in perspective as
she copes with her own rheumatoid arthritis at age 49 after a close friend dies
of pancreatic cancer, etc. Her book’s title
refers to letting go of perfectionism (like pesky to-do lists in favor of a
single item list No. 1: Free yourself from any and all Things You Should Know Lists)
and the panties made headlines in her 2007 Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece, Flee the Fire, Pack the Panties,
or her lesson on what to take with her in the event of an emergency evacuation. After reading Effort,
I wanted to read more of Annabelle’s mid-life adventures; as a career changer,
I especially liked her essay about reinventing herself with a new career at age
51,
after deciding that writing could get lonely so she tried politics until she
found herself longing for “the solitude of my writing desk. The words of a
Dostoevsky character pop into my mind: ‘The more I love humanity in general,
the less I love man in particular.’ I am not as much of a people person as I’d
thought. Politics is not for me.”
Political
pundit Neal Milner’s The Gift of
Underpants: Stories Across Generations and Place is his memoir about
growing up Jewish with his Old Country grandparents in the same household in Wisconsin , living as a haole for the past 40 years in Hawaii where “being Jewish adds zest, recognition and
mystery,” and visiting his in-laws in a Florida retirement community
In Planning for the Past, he writes about his immigrant ancestors
quitting work (simple) while his generation has the privilege of planning for
retirement (existential). As political
science professor at the University
of Hawaii Hawaii -- thoughtful, funny, very easy on the eyes (worthy of red chili pepper in ratemyprofessors.com )!
This week’s White House blog announced the leader, future
website and potential topics for the White House Conference on Aging in 2015,
which
also marks the 50th anniversaries of the
Older Americans Act (July 14), Medicare and Medicaid (July 30), as
well as the 80th anniversary of Social Security (August 14). Potential topics include: retirement security, long-term services and
supports, healthy aging, and elder abuse prevention. (The Employee Retirement Income Security Act celebrates its 40th this year on September 2!)
Wandering with the blind leading
On July 26, the 24th
anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), I attended programs
at Lighthouse for the Blind and Independent Living Resource Center (ILRC).
At the Lighthouse event,
we met Belo Cipriani,
the official spokesperson for Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB), and his 80-pound guide dog Oslo. (GDB
was a former client so I worked at its spacious San Rafael
headquarters, 20 miles north of San
Francisco
Belo discussed the value
of interdependence,
making friends in the community (as only another blind person can understand),
learning to anticipate or plan ahead for accommodations (call in advance for
Braille), navigating with a white cane (lots of memorizing and counting steps
so mobility becomes a chore, people are more courteous) versus guide dog (which
become the eyes and social life of the handler, bringing more public attention
and engagement), applying for a dog to match his lifestyle (Oslo was pre-screened for travel to rabies-free Hawaii), his GDB training and the only
guide dog school with graduate support services, bonding with guide dog to
trust with your life (“what they do for love” though service dogs are not trained
to protect handlers), different types of service dogs (blind, diabetic, deaf,
cane companion, etc.), ADA protection for service dogs (which wear
harness uniform on duty to signify no petting), calling police when his
dog was denied access by a restaurant that ended up fined $2,500 for ADA
violation, retiring service dogs (his first service dog Madge retired after
eight years, which is equivalent to 60 human years, when she didn’t want to
board a plane, indicating she was tired and didn’t want to work anymore, so she was
adopted by his sister to retain health benefits), and being a volunteer puppyraiser.
Blind leading the blind at
ILRC, which celebrated
the grand opening of its new street level space designed by 51-year-old architect
Chris Downey,
who lost his vision four years ago days after surgery to remove a brain tumor.
ILRC Executive Director
Jessie Lorenz, in appreciation, presented wine bottles to Chris, who designed
building using Braille blueprint, and his wife Rosa, who picked colors. Check out Chris’ TED talk, Design with the Blind in Mind:
“if you design a city with
the blind in mind, you'll have a rich, walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of
options and choices all available at the street level. If you design a city with
the blind in mind, sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous. The space between buildings
will be well-balanced between people and cars. In fact, cars, who needs
them? If you're blind, you don't
drive. (Laughter) They don't like it when you drive. (Laughter) If you design a city with
the blind in mind, you design a city with a robust, accessible, well-connected
mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around. If you design a city with
the blind in mind, there'll be jobs, lots of jobs. Blind people want to work
too. They want to earn a living.”
And YOU can promote
accessible paths of travel on all public sidewalks in San Francisco by letting
Department of Public Works know where YOU need a curb ramp through its Curb Ramp Program or call 311.
Wandering into the future
How a San Francisco Architect Reframes Design for the Blind
ReplyDeleteWednesday, August 6, 2014, by Lamar Anderson
We think of architecture as a visual discipline, but vision is just one of our spatial senses. Close your eyes, after all, and the room around you is still there. When Downey lost his sight, his curiosity about the way environments are constructed didn't go away; it simply shifted to his other senses. When he could see, Downey often sketched as a way of sorting out architectural details he found puzzling. Now he taps his cane to get a sense of the volume of the space he's in, or he'll touch a wall or a transition point in the building to figure out how it's put together. He doesn't use a guide dog, because he would lose that intimate contact with the landscape. "I'm often trying to understand as much of the architectural space and form as I can," he says. The listening skills required practice, but the tactile ones didn't. "As kids we learn through touch, before our visual system is fully developed," he explains. Downey's years of cycling also gave him a feel for the modulations of the streets, down to the dips and crests of the roads around his Piedmont home. Whenever people ask his wife for directions, Downey invariably answers.
When he's pressed for time, or just trying to travel efficiently from place to place, Downey doesn't bother with trying to create that mental model of his surroundings. "I'm just connecting points," he says, "to find, 'This is the flow that works through here.'" In those instances, he experiences space as essentially bland. "You could think of it like a really monotonous environment that is sort of frustrating or confusing because everything's the same," he says. "Like a convention center or airport." (One exception: Chicago O'Hare, Downey's favorite airport, because the concourse's terrazzo floors and vaulted glass skylight bounce sound in a legible way, leaving a kind of sonic breadcrumb trail.) For the most part, places that tend to be dull for the sighted world also do little for people who can't see: think low, undifferentiated ceilings and vast swaths of carpet tile. Carpet dampens sound, and the unchanging ceiling, when sounds bounce off it, gives no indication of which direction is which. Think of being trapped in the world's largest DMV. . .
Far from being unemployable, Downey found himself in possession of a rare combination of skills. Here were two groups that had little in common: blind people and the hypervisual architects who design spaces. In the Venn diagram linking them, Downey was a set of one. . .
Since landing that initial consulting job on the veterans' rehabilitation center, Downey has carved out a niche helping a visual industry locate its blind spots. . .
Even when followed to the letter, the ADA rules don't address how someone with poor eyesight experiences a place. Without sight, curving paths are particularly vexing, especially if the path is texturally identical to everything around it. "You have to have something tactile to work around that curvature," says Downey. "How do you know what the radius is? Even if you knew, how would you calibrate that into your mind to walk the radius?" For the same reason, round furniture is problematic; there's no way to walk away and know for certain where you're going. . .
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/08/06/how_a_san_francisco_architect_reframes_design_for_the_blind.php
Honest Writing Is Funny Writing
ReplyDeleteMemoirist Sean Wilsey says he knows he's finished with a story when it makes him laugh.
AUG 19 2014, 2:13 PM ET
Writing memoir, after all, is usually a decision to engage with the most painful, fraught, or embarrassing portions of your experience. Memoirs, like most narratives, are about conflict and drama and pain. When life is good—or even more than good, when life makes sense—I really don’t feel any desire to write about it. Only when life becomes painful, when I’m suffering, do I feel like I’ve got the material to work on the page.
But just writing down one’s troubles isn’t enough. You have to bring new perspective and insight to your suffering. For me, there’s a sure sign I’ll be able to muster the maturity to it takes to make art out of my life: When I’m finally able to laugh at a younger version of myself.
The things we can’t laugh about are the things we haven’t grown out of yet. Not laughing is, in some ways, a failure to grow beyond things that are still too close, too present, too hurtful. Laughter is a release from all that. It shows we’ve moved on. I don’t think I’m ever ready to write about an experience or period of my life until I have distance from it—the kind of distance laughter signifies. . . .
That’s beautiful thing: As life goes on, everything that once seemed important eventually doesn’t seem that way anymore. The things that felt so serious, so crucial and agonizing, lose urgency with time; what’s left is the comedy of it. Not that laughter takes away the seriousness of one’s original experiences, of course. Important or troubling experiences stay with us—but, with time, they begin to contain humor within them, too. I think there’s something dishonest about writing that isn’t funny. I can’t engage with a piece of work without an element of humor to it. Laughter and levity are important aspects of human life, even at its darkest, and writing that lacks those qualities denies the full richness of experience. . . .
I think there would be something really sad if you continued to take yourself seriously throughout your life. It would mean you hadn’t changed at all, and the idea that you haven’t changed is a deeply tragic one. That kind of stasis is certainly a dangerous quality in an artist. If you’re just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again, how interesting is that?
Being able to grow in this way—to sustain the kind of growth that ultimately allows laughter—is a crucial skill for writers, because it allows you to move past your initial, limited conception of a project. When creative projects refuse to follow our plans for them, that’s a good thing. In my journalism, I’m surprised by how often I end up saying the very opposite of what I thought or hoped to say when I began a piece. If I think I’m going to attack on an idea or person, say, I’ll end up having a more nuanced view, perhaps even a kind of respect for what I once had hoped to skewer. That’s the definition of growth. . .
It happens, too, when you write about the people in your life. There are people whom I’ve known for decades now, and I’m constantly understanding new things about them as I work with them on the page. I come to new conclusions about who they are, and why they did the things that they did—especially with people who were adults when I was a child. Now that I’m raising kids of my own, I end up having totally different insight into how certain decisions end up getting made.
So, you have to be able to laugh at the scope of your ideas when you began, and let go of the ideas you thought you had before you began the work. . .
I think comedy is the deepest form of release. We’re prisoners of the things that we’ve done and the circumstances we’ve lived through, and we can never change our pasts. But there’s a key that can let you out of all that, that tells you you’ve come to understand something and are at peace with it. You know when you’re holding the key—because you can laugh.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/08/honest-writing-is-funny/378763/
The Reality of Nomadland Life in America
ReplyDeleteBy Lisa Iannucci
February 18, 2021
For four decades, Jean Hardwick had a good, stable career, health and life insurance and a Sarasota, Fla. home she owned and loved. Then in 2015, catastrophe struck. After a near-fatal reaction to a prescription medication, Hardwick, now 60, found herself undergoing heart surgery, suffering from seizures and facing more than $500,000 in medical bills.
"There is government assistance, but it's loaded with Catch-22s," Hardwick said. "They say, 'We can't help you because you own a home, so call us back when the property is not in your name anymore.' Applying for disability takes around two years. In the meantime, you sell your furniture and clothes to make ends meet."
While Hardwick was finally on the road to recovery, she lost her home. After her disability payments began coming through, she decided to make a change and begin living a nomadic life, driving from temp job and location to another.
"In December 2019, I lucked into an older campervan [a van equipped as a traveling home] and sold or gave away everything," she explained.
Hardwick's not despondent about her new life. She says she sees it more like "processing, figuring out how to move forward, trying to find silver linings."
Hardwick is just one of many Americans over 60 who — when faced with mounting debt and exorbitant housing prices — have decided to pack it all in. Into their van or small RV that is, working odd jobs on the road and living in "Nomadland,"…a fictional story based on the real-life people featured in journalist Jessica Bruder's bestselling book of the same name…
The Golden Globes-nominated film follows a middle-aged woman named Fern (played by McDormand) who, like Hardwick, faces extreme financial challenges. Fern is a rural widow who loses her job at the U.S. Gypsum factory in Empire, Nev., and chooses to live in her van, working short-term jobs as an Amazon warehouse seasonal worker and at an RV park as a camp host.
"Nomadland," written and directed by Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao (the first woman to receive the Palm Springs International Film Festival's Director of the Year Award), features real nomads Linda May "Swankie" and Bob Wells, creator of the popular CheapRVLiving YouTube channel. All are over 60.
Twenty years ago, Wells — a former grocery store worker — was also forced into van life, following a divorce that left him with little money to pay rent and other expenses. "I drove past a business with a big, green box van for sale and thought, 'I could live in that and then I wouldn't have to pay rent and I could keep my own money,'" said Wells.
…things changed when he changed his thinking.
"I just acted like I was going camping," Wells said. "I adapted, and it started to feel very comfortable. Plus, I was saving a thousand dollars a month from not paying rent."
Wells also found freedom as a nomad.
"Our society and our values are all oriented towards things and money and power and prestige," he said. "When you live in a van, you don't have any of that. But I also had more time to spend with my family and I had peace of mind."…
Bruder, like Wells, fears that the pandemic-driven economy will drive more Americans into a nomadic life…
…Zhao said she wanted Fern "to be a guide to be able to bring us into this vast, really rich world of nomadic living. What I've learned is that you have to anchor the audience in one person's intimate experience, so they can feel comfortable to be able to experience everything else and without getting lost…"
…McDormand said at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I think that we really were hoping that the audience would not worry for her, but only be excited by the possibilities of her seeing what was going to come around the next corner."…
https://www.nextavenue.org/the-reality-of-nomadland-life-in-america/
Annabelle Gurwitch's Mid-Life Maelstrom: Divorce, Cancer, 'Downward Mobility'
ReplyDeleteMarch 7, 2021
Mandalit del Barco
"It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times." Author Annabelle Gurwitch now scoffs at those opening lines of her new memoir — she had no idea just how bad it would get.
In You're Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility, Gurwitch finds herself divorced after a 22-year marriage, an empty-nester with no retirement plan. After losing her union-sponsored health insurance, her payments balloon from $600 a year to $1,200 a month. Her parents have died. Then the pandemic hits. And her cat dies. But wait — there's more.
As she was editing the book last summer, Gurwitch quarantined with her child Ezra, who'd boomeranged home after college. They went for a COVID-19 test together because Gurwitch had a bit of a cough. She wasn't worried — after all, she exercises every day and doesn't smoke — but the doctor took an X-ray, and then informed her ... over her car's speakerphone ... that she had stage IV lung cancer.
"Lung cancer, what?" She still is incredulous. "It's a silent killer. So, yes, COVID has saved my life," she says. "It's just this ... crazy irony that because of this pandemic, I found out that I have this life-threatening disease. When I say this, by the way, it still sounds like I'm talking about someone else. This can't be me. My life is very, very surreal. It's surreal on top of surreal. You just gotta laugh about it."
…The former actor and TV host has written other comedic memoirs — about her marriage, about getting fired, about getting older. In this new book, she writes about parenting her non-binary child who's in recovery from addiction. And she talks about inching toward 60 with an uncertain financial future. She realized her life was not going to look anything like, say, Diane Keaton's fabulous character in the movie Something's Gotta Give.
"My goodness, she's a middle-aged woman. She just happens to be the most successful playwright on Broadway. And she lives in a house at the Hamptons," Gurwitch enthuses. "This is when I actually started thinking about this book, thinking this is not the future that a lot of us thought in mid-life. I mean, honestly, I never thought I'd have that kind of lavish future, but just the stability, that basic stability."
She found that like a lot of people her age — on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation X — she was not prepared for "retirement." To help pay the mortgage, Gurwitch started taking in boarders. She rented out a room in her home in Los Angeles' Los Feliz neighborhood.
"I think of myself as an acquired taste, you know, like I'm not for everybody…So the idea of having roommates at like ... my 50s, I just ... you know, I always had this image, like: landlady, cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She's in a blousy house dress and stockings falling down."
…"There have been so many experiences that come with downward mobility…I'm not saying financial insecurity is good or desirable, but there are silver linings, things that I have found that have been so redemptive. My fantasy was that I could have this little, like, my own little arts colony, and in a sense, I do."
At first, Gurwitch worried that her book wouldn't be relatable, but, "this pandemic has turned us all into one big financial insecurity," she says.
Her friend, actor Andie MacDowell, says she admires Gurwitch's sense of humor: "She's original and her writing is very endearing, and funny, and charming. People will take the journey with her and reflect on themselves as well."…
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/07/974229491/annabelle-gurwitchs-mid-life-maelstrom-divorce-cancer-downward-mobility