The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead is a hard book to classify: is it a precis about how the body ages? Yes. Is it a memoir of the author’s and his dad’s aging? Yes. Is it a family memoir? Yes again. The author starts with a simple observation of his [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘aging’
March 25, 2009
Deaf Sentence by David Lodge
By the always funny and understated David Lodge, Deaf Sentence starts out as a simple, perhaps superficial story about middle-aged deafness with hilarious observations about the indignities of miscommunications but veers into the heartbreak of helping aging parents, balanced by the joys and beauty of simple things. Very meditative and zen by the end, after you [...]
February 4, 2009
How to Live by Henry Alford
How to Live claims to chronicle a search for wisdom from old people (while they are still on this earth.) And indeed, it does. Chronicle the search, that is, which consists of the minutiae of arranging interviews interspersed with not very interesting conversations with famous people such as Ram Dass (would love to be living in [...]
February 2, 2009
Mrs. Astor Regrets by Meryl Gordon
The rich are not like us. For starters, they have several “residences” (nothing as gauche as houses or apartments) in wonderful locales in which they alternate depending on the season — although they also rent other luxurious residences when needed, like a month in Florida during the winter. They have staff, 8 for Mrs Astor, [...]
December 1, 2008
No More Words by Reeve Lindbergh
I picked up this book because I liked Forward From Here and I was disappointed. Like Forward from Here, this is a journal-like description of the author’s life but the topic is different; here she focuses on the final months of her mother’s life (Charles Lindbergh’s widow), when she was completely dependent on caregivers because [...]
February 2, 2008
Mothering Mother by Carol O’Dell
A true story of a daughter taking care of her aging and increasingly debilitated mother while raising three daughters of her own, keeping house, and escaping to college at night. I happened to read Mothering Mother right after To die well : your right to comfort, calm, and choice in the last days of life by Sidney H. [...]
