Before I came to live in the retirement community, I was in my house alone a great deal of the time. I slept alone, ate alone, watched television alone, made messes and cleaned them up alone, walked alone outdoors in the afternoons. Because of covid the fewer people I saw up-close, the safer I was. […]
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Is There a Chaplain in the House? If you are helping an elderly person choose an assisted care community, be sure to ask: Is there a chaplain? This is not a minor detail. It is one of the essentials. Anytime you have a building full of elderly people, as you do in such a […]
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Once a friend of mine, visiting in a nursing home for the elderly, said “Merry Christmas” at the bedside of a woman who then began to cry and said, “I didn’t know it was Christmas.” My friend was angry. She had heard Christmas music in the lobby, but there was none on […]
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Before I moved to the retirement community, I was alone in a big house, responsible for the meals I ate, the dirty dishes, my laundry, the kitchen floor, shopping, fetching the mail, taking out the trash and knocking the unexpected snow off the awning over my deck. And my doctor kept asking what I […]
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In October, I sat on the porch with Bee, another resident here. I was in one of the big white rocking chairs that always seem to invite me to sit awhile. My friend was in her wheelchair. The day was sunny, the sky brilliant, and across the road the strip of forest that protects us […]
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Should residing in an assisted living/ retirement home enable me to escape the chaos of the world? This may not be a question that anyone is saying aloud, but one that voices a secret hope, a need that has grown out of our weariness. A tough week caused me to wonder. Fires in California, the […]
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A couple of years ago while consciously thinking about how to help myself grow old, I realized that it was really important to me to keep learning. This was partly recognition that learning had something to do with my brain health, and that I would need my brain when my legs were already worn […]
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This morning, thinking again about a lovely event I attended last week, I realized another perk of living a long life: you get to see your children retire. You might even get to sit and listen while people you don’t know talk about them and their accomplishments. You get to listen to them as […]
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Four birds sat in a tree. Three of them decided to fly. How many were left in the tree? (A small math problem taken from a Lebanese friend’s fb page this morning.) But you wanted to hear about that storm in Texas. It was 1985. Our friend Maria Daoud had come home with us […]
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Monday had a special feeling from the beginning. This was the day we were getting vaccinated, all of us here, residents and staff, except for the energetic young mother who cleans my apartment on Tuesdays and Charlie down the hall who limps every step of the miles he walks up and down the halls every […]
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