The Denial of Aging

The Denial of Aging PDF Author: Muriel R. Gillick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037596
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
You’ve argued politics with your aunt since high school, but failing eyesight now prevents her from keeping current with the newspaper. Your mother fractured her hip last year and is confined to a wheelchair. Your father has Alzheimer’s and only occasionally recognizes you. Someday, as Muriel Gillick points out in this important yet unsettling book, you too will be old. And no matter what vitamin regimen you’re on now, you will likely one day find yourself sick or frail. How do you prepare? What will you need? With passion and compassion, Gillick chronicles the stories of elders who have struggled with housing options, with medical care decisions, and with finding meaning in life. Skillfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy, and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities. In addition to doing all we can to maintain our health, we must vote and organize—for housing choices that consider autonomy as well as safety, for employment that utilizes the skills and wisdom of the elderly, and for better management of disability and chronic disease. Most provocatively, Gillick argues against desperate attempts to cure the incurable. Care should focus on quality of life, not whether it can be prolonged at any cost. “A good old age,” writes Gillick, “is within our grasp.” But we must reach in the right direction.

The Denial of Aging

The Denial of Aging PDF Author: Muriel R. Gillick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037596
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
You’ve argued politics with your aunt since high school, but failing eyesight now prevents her from keeping current with the newspaper. Your mother fractured her hip last year and is confined to a wheelchair. Your father has Alzheimer’s and only occasionally recognizes you. Someday, as Muriel Gillick points out in this important yet unsettling book, you too will be old. And no matter what vitamin regimen you’re on now, you will likely one day find yourself sick or frail. How do you prepare? What will you need? With passion and compassion, Gillick chronicles the stories of elders who have struggled with housing options, with medical care decisions, and with finding meaning in life. Skillfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy, and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities. In addition to doing all we can to maintain our health, we must vote and organize—for housing choices that consider autonomy as well as safety, for employment that utilizes the skills and wisdom of the elderly, and for better management of disability and chronic disease. Most provocatively, Gillick argues against desperate attempts to cure the incurable. Care should focus on quality of life, not whether it can be prolonged at any cost. “A good old age,” writes Gillick, “is within our grasp.” But we must reach in the right direction.

Aging Thoughtfully

Aging Thoughtfully PDF Author: Martha Craven Nussbaum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190600233
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
A philosopher and a lawyer-economist examine the challenges of the last third of life. They write about friendship, sex, retirement communities, inheritance, poverty, and the depiction of aging women in films. These essays, or conversations, will help readers of all ages think about how to age well, or at least thoughtfully, and how to interact with older family members and friends.

Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial

Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial PDF Author: Nicole Hollander
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781410403858
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book

Book Description
A guide to some of the most important decisions that come in one's mature years, for example: Accept the senior citizen discount or feign indignation?

A Bittersweet Season

A Bittersweet Season PDF Author: Jane Gross
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030747240X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Get Book

Book Description
Wise, smart, and ever-helpful, an essential guide to caring for aging parents. When Jane Gross found herself suddenly thrust into a caretaker role for her eighty-five year-old mother, she was forced to face challenges that she had never imagined. As she and her younger brother struggled to move her mother into an assisted living facility, deal with seemingly never-ending costs, and adapt to the demands on her time and psyche, she learned valuable and important lessons. Here, the longtime New York Times expert on the subject of elderly care and the founder of the New Old Age blog shares her frustrating, heartbreaking, enlightening, and ultimately redemptive journey, providing us along the way with valuable information that she wishes she had known earlier. We learn why finding a general practitioner with a specialty in geriatrics should be your first move when relocating a parent; how to deal with Medicaid and Medicare; how to understand and provide for your own needs as a caretaker; and much more. Includes chapters on the following subjects: Finding Our Better Selves The Myth of Assisted Living The Vestiges of Family Medicine The Best Doctors Money Can Buy The Biology, Sociology, and Psychology of Aging Therapeutic Fibs

I'm Not Getting Older

I'm Not Getting Older PDF Author: Leigh Anne Jasheway
Publisher: Leigh Anne Jasheway-Bryant
ISBN: 9780967448602
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Get Book

Book Description
Stand-up comic Leigh Anne Jasheway (author of Bedtime Stories or Dogs, Bedtime Stories for Cats, and five other humor books) has written the perfect book for the 40 million women in their late thirties to mid-fifties who are tired of depressing books about getting older! This wacky view of the middle ages (no, not the kind with dungeons and chastity belts... ) is filled with hysterical anti-aging tips found nowhere else. Tips like: -- If you're thinking about getting a pet, consider a Sharpei. Looking into her wrinkled face every morning will make your skin seem smooth and firm in comparison. -- Not every woman has night sweats... Many get night sweets -- the irresistible urge to take Ben & Jerry to bed. -- When your friends ask how you keep your skin looking so young, tell them you do acid. You don't have to tell them it's alpha hydroxy acid. -- The trick for keeping your sex life exciting as you get older is to try new things like making love in exotic locations. The other side of the bed, for example.

This Chair Rocks

This Chair Rocks PDF Author: Ashton Applewhite
Publisher: Celadon Books
ISBN: 1250311489
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book

Book Description
“Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination, and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author Author, activist, and TED speaker Ashton Applewhite has written a rousing manifesto calling for an end to discrimination and prejudice on the basis of age. In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation. Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. Explaining the roots of ageism in history and how it divides and debases, Applewhite examines how ageist stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and offers a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of bias. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride!

Still Here

Still Here PDF Author: Ram Dass
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1573228710
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
More than thirty years ago, an entire generation sought a new way of life, looking for fulfillment and meaning in a way no one had before. Leaving his teaching job at Harvard, Ram Dass embodied the role of spiritual seeker, showing others how to find peace within themselves in one of the greatest spiritual classics of the twentieth century, the two-million-copy bestseller Be Here Now. As many of that generation enter the autumn of their years, the big questions of peace and of purpose have returned demanding answers. And once again, Ram Dass blazes a new trail, inviting all to join him on the next stage of the journey.

The Art of Aging

The Art of Aging PDF Author: Sherwin B. Nuland
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812975413
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
In his landmark book How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland profoundly altered our perception of the end of life. Now in The Art of Aging, Dr. Nuland steps back to explore the impact of aging on our minds and bodies, strivings and relationships. Melding a scientist’s passion for truth with a humanist’s understanding of the heart and soul, Nuland has created a wise, frank, and inspiring book about the ultimate stage of life’s journey. The onset of aging can be so gradual that we are often surprised to find that one day it is fully upon us. The changes to the senses, appearance, reflexes, physical endurance, and sexual appetites are undeniable–and rarely welcome–and yet, as Nuland shows, getting older has its surprising blessings. Age concentrates not only the mind, but the body’s energies, leading many to new sources of creativity, perception, and spiritual intensity. Growing old, Nuland teaches us, is not a disease but an art–and for those who practice it well, it can bring extraordinary rewards. “I’m taking the journey even while I describe it,” writes Nuland, now in his mid-seventies and a veteran of nearly four decades of medical practice. Drawing on his own life and work, as well as the lives of friends both famous and not, Nuland portrays the astonishing variability of the aging experience. Faith and inner strength, the deepening of personal relationships, the realization that career does not define identity, the acceptance that some goals will remain unaccomplished–these are among the secrets of those who age well. Will scientists one day fulfill the dream of eternal youth? Nuland examines the latest research into extending life and the scientists who are pursuing it. But ultimately, what compels him most is what happens to the mind and spirit as life reaches its culminating decades. Reflecting the wisdom of a long lifetime, The Art of Aging is a work of luminous insight, unflinching candor, and profound compassion.

By Youth Possessed

By Youth Possessed PDF Author: Victoria Secunda
Publisher: Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description


Too Young to be Old

Too Young to be Old PDF Author: Nancy K. Schlossberg
Publisher: APA Life Tools
ISBN: 9781433827495
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
The latest take on aging well from Nancy K. Schlossberg looks at the basic issues facing a growing group of Americans over 55-health, finances, and relationships. With this book, readers will be able to think about and develop a deliberate plan to age happily.