Looking toward Christmas 2008, I recall a story of two friends. (To preserve privacy, let’s call them Nancy and Joanne.) About their relationship, Nancy says “I had the most in common with her of any of my friends.”
They also shared the same house, Joanne as owner and Nancy her tenant. For a long time, that landlord/tenant relationship, though not without some tensions, had worked for them.
Should doctors apologize to their patients when they have made a mistake? Tom Delbanco thinks so.
Himself a doctor, and a long-time professor at Harvard Medical School, Tom urges his fellow physicians to adopt this practice. In an opinion piece on the New York Times web site, he and a colleague, Dr. Sigall K. Bell, argue the benefits of taking this approach to medical error.
“I don’t want to look.” That’s what Carol Lieberman says about some funds she set up for her grandchildren. She fears the money is shrinking in the current recession and financial crisis.
Carol works in Cambridge as director of a program that helps older people to volunteer. Asked if those people are worried about the situation, she says: “It’s not just seniors – it’s everybody, all brackets of society.”
Finding oneself old continues, day by day, to rank among life’s most astounding events. For me, it came as an unprecedented surprise to discover myself an eighty-year-old. Up until now, this has been something that happens to other people.
Now that it has happened to me, I feel genuinely happy to have reached a kind of eminence. Like many before me, I have been inducted into the army of elders, those who have joined the ranks of the new aged.
Were I ever asked about giving advice in later life, my first rule would be: Don’t.
That’s because hardly anyone welcomes advice or values it. Even when they earnestly ask for it, normal people, deep down, do not really want to receive direction from anyone else.
To celebrate a birthday, I recently ate dinner at a restaurant known as one of the best in town. I looked forward to the meal, confident that it would be delicious.
However, the lamb that I ordered turned out to be loaded with salt, lots of it. Although lamb is my favorite meat, I sent the dish back. I could not continue to eat it without driving my blood pressure skyward.
Several dozen people, most of them in later life, were recently asked if any of them collected stamps. Of that number not a single person does.
Had you asked the same question in the 1930s and 1940s, many adults middle-aged and older would have been proud to identify themselves as stamp collectors. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American president during much of that era, led the way. He was famous for this hobby, as many newspaper photos of the time attest.