by CathyG | Jul 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
I wanted to like this book. I ended up hating it.
First, the guy is heartless. His mother had a DNR. On p 19, he writes: “Her DNR said to withhold care if she had no reasonable chance of regaining a meaningful life. But this was more like bringing in a hose if the drapes in her room caught fire. Afterward she would return to the life she had in her neat apartment. She had friends and grandchildren she loved; she had matinee concerts at the Philharmonic. People with much less enjoy great lives. It seemed ungrateful to reject that life as not worth living. If she wanted to starve to death she could do it without our help. We approved the tube.”
This is cruel and heartless. He’s clearly judging his mother and her quality of life. And starving to death isn’t as easy as it seems. He’s able to be more dispassionate with his interview subject, John Sorensen: “None of us really wants immortality on other people’s terms; it’s no kindness to wish a scaled-down version of it on the people who want it least.” (more…)
by CathyG | Jul 15, 2018 | Uncategorized
Writing for BBC Smithsonian, Ellen Barry (“It’s the Ultimate TV Prize: An Unscripted Queen Elizabeth” Jan 14, 2018) opens with:
“In the annals of television interviews, a drawing-room chat with a 91-year-old woman, watching home movies and offering occasional droll remarks, would not seem like edgy stuff.”
“But that all changes when the woman is Queen Elizabeth II.”
Those two sentences show a great deal about the world view of aging. If you’re of sufficiently high status, age becomes irrelevant. I’ve been saying this for awhile. Good things in age come from continuity. You can’t begin a new career, but some careers allow you to continue and even embellish on what you’ve done before. You can cement your status. You can’t build it from scratch. (more…)
by CathyG | Jun 4, 2018 | stereotypes of aging, Uncategorized
A Review of Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich
I wanted to like this book because I share some of Barbara’s attitudes toward health. Like her, I exercise for fun and even more for vanity. I eat what I want and forego medical screenings. Unfortunately, as other reviewers noted, the book turns into a rant that gets a little annoying. Overall the book suffers — on a larger scale — from the same flaw that undermined Bait and Switch. Ehrenreich takes a particular example from her own experience, generalizes, and editorializes. (more…)
by CathyG | Jan 15, 2018 | stereotypes of aging, Uncategorized
Someone posted on Facebook:
“My husband gave advice to a guy who’s feeling discouraged in dating. I overheard him advising the guy, ‘You can practice by talking to women in their 70s, just to learn how to relate to women as real people, and maybe get some advice on how to approach younger women.'”
So now the role of an “older” woman is to be an unpaid relationship coach to a clueless guy. And of course she’s filled with advice on how to deal with women in their twenties, since it’s been awhile and dating norms have, um, changed just a little. (more…)
by CathyG | Jan 14, 2018 | Uncategorized
This article by Dhruv Khullar was published in the NYTimes.
Jan. 10, 2018 – https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/upshot/youre-sick-whose-fault-is-that.html
The author writes: “Behavior contributes to nearly half of cancer deaths in the United States, and up to 40 percent of all deaths.”
The first citation refers to a popular news magazine with no links to the actual study. The second refers to a NEJM article that draws the 40% statistic from yet another article, this one appearing to be a summary in JAMA, associating numbers of deaths with specific behaviors, with virtually no info dabout how that number was calculated. (more…)
by CathyG | Nov 18, 2017 | Uncategorized
Milestones is a tabloid type newspaper published by the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging and distributed free in Philadelphia and downloadable online. It’s the usual party line pep talk stuff.
Their November 2017 issue included an article about suicide. Here’s how I responded.
I was appalled by your article on suicide among the elderly. Milestones reaches a large, diverse audience with a tabloid type newspaper. You have a rare opportunity to share accurate information and raise concerns. Instead, you present a simplistic view of a complex subject, in a way that could actually harm the very people you are targeting for help. (more…)
