Books to Give or Keep in 2017
December 06, 2017 By
Pepper Evans
Friends all know I’m an avid reader, and it’s that time of year when they ask me to recommend books for holiday gift lists. I primarily seek out new fiction, but I enjoy deviating for an interesting memoir. Each of my picks connects to aging, from midlife on up.
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How to Use Your Brain in Perpetuity
October 14, 2016 By
Alix Kates Shulman
As I learned the hard way eight years ago, when my husband, Scott, began the downward spiral of dementia after suffering a traumatic brain injury, doctors are loath to admit they know little about what causes dementia and nothing about how to prevent, treat or cure it.
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How to Have a Good Life: Lean In—to Your Relationships
September 09, 2016 By
Flora Davis
I was stuck for a time when I was in my 20s. My career and dating possibilities were going nowhere, and I struggled with depression. I was far from home, but one day I talked to my father about all of this over the phone. Afterward, he sent me a long, thoughtful letter. He was then in his early 50s, and he wrote that, looking back over his own life, he was convinced that the most important thing for him had always been his relationships with family and friends.
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Oh, to Be 70 Again
June 27, 2016 By
Flora Davis
Oh, to be 70 again with the rest of my life opening up in front of me. When I was 70, I was working for a foundation and thought it the best job I’d ever had or was likely to have. My career as a magazine writer was behind me and I had few regrets.
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If I Lose My Hearing, Will I Also Lose My Memory?
March 30, 2016 By
Flora Davis
I don’t hear as well as I used to. For the past few years, I’ve had to strain to follow the conversation in a crowded room, and I’ve watched television with the help of closed captions for the hearing-impaired. But like the vast majority of other Americans who have some hearing loss, I put off going to an audiologist to find out whether I needed hearing aids. Then I read something that made me think delaying the test might be a mistake.
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80 and Counting
March 09, 2016 By
Flora Davis
I’ve turned 80 and it’s a little scary. I’m healthy and still working, but I’m well aware that medical problems began for many of my friends once they were in their 80s.
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Time on the Run
February 05, 2016 By
Flora Davis
The woman sharing the elevator with me looked to be in her 70s.
“How can it be the end of the week already,” she asked, “when I feel as if Monday was just yesterday?”
I felt the same way—and probably so did most of my neighbors in the retirement community where I live.
Time speeds up in your later years. Sometimes it feels like a cruel joke: the weeks and months seem to pass at warp speed just when there’s so much less time ahead of us.
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Scammed! A Warning
January 18, 2016 By
Flora Davis
That day in December, my bursitis had flared up and I’d lost a filling, but what
really bothered me was that my computer wasn’t working and I felt stupid. I’d fallen for a scam. What’s more, I’d just read an article about how often that happens to older Americans like me. We lose almost $13 billion a year to scams and identity theft. No wonder we’re a favorite target of con artists! I couldn’t help wondering: Would I have been so easily fooled a decade ago?
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The Dance of Experience and Time
November 17, 2015 By
Alix Kates Shulman
Before Scott, my beloved husband, fell from a sleeping loft, sustaining the devastating traumatic brain injury that transformed our lives, I divided experience into two distinct kinds, both of which any satisfying life depends upon. The first consists of those pleasurable, transitory experiences, often sensual—like eating, sex, art—that quickly vanish. The second is the kind of stable, future-oriented experience you build upon—work accomplished, knowledge accumulated, habit inculcated, skills expanded, resources conserved.
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While We’re Young, 2014, USA, 97 min.
April 20, 2015 By
Pete Croatto
Getting old doesn’t just happen. You age every day, until like Cornelia and Josh in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s
While We’re Young, you wonder how the hell you got
here. The bittersweet fun of Baumbach’s tart comedy is how Cornelia and Josh keep dodging the hard truth: they don’t have the energy—or the stomach—to stay young. Yet they try longer than they should. We understand why. We’ve been there or soon will be. Reality bites.
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Still Alice, 2014, USA, 101 min.
February 27, 2015 By
Pete Croatto
Still Alice tracks a family’s changing dynamics after a life-shattering diagnosis and serves as a showcase for Julianne Moore, whose beautiful, freshly Oscar-winning work allows us to see her family’s struggles as part of the title character’s long, losing battle with herself. The movie proceeds at an uncomfortably languid pace until the end, when we’re shaken.
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One-Way Conversations
January 15, 2015 By
Flora Davis
I often talk to myself, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. I never did my thinking out loud before my husband died. I wondered: Do I do it now because I live alone or is this typical of aging?
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Multitasking after 40
April 10, 2014 By
Flora Davis
I’ve always prided myself on my ability to multitask—I hate to do just one thing if I can manage two at the same time. I never go anywhere without a book just in case I get a chance to read. If I have to walk a few blocks, I can often finish a chapter as I plod along. I usually do my driving with a news program or talk show on the radio.
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