Aging

My treating older people have been dotted with experiences of ageism which, years later, will recount to me something I regret. So common is ageism, and so natural is it to those of us who have received little training in geriatrics, that functional decline becomes the sine qua non of old age.  

Recently, I read about the origin of the term "ageism," coined in 1968 by an American gerontologist Dr. Robert Butler. Known for his decades-long passion to challenge the deep-seated age-based discrimination in healthcare, Butler called for sweeping policy reforms when older patients were often neglected and simply shrugged off. 

We've all been there. I've lost track of the number of times I said something like "You know that she's very old. She can't tolerate more treatment. You are asking too much. She will soon be no more."

I have learned more about special needs of old people by looking after my dad than any lecture in geriatrics medicine. It's challenging, but I must agree with Butler that many of the ailments of the old are possibly preventable, probably rewardable, and most certainly treatable.

Pineapple

We tend to look inside of ourselves to explain the norms and outside of ourselves to call something deviant.

The debut novel of Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street, is a good example of such conflict. Think about the chaos when a middle-class New England girl married into a family of much higher social class. Characters in the novel are our witnesses to opposite values. Millennials, who only bought things from Instagram ads, stand in contrast to Generation X who still sift through catalogs from mailbox. Daughters who prefer texting to talking on the phone are decidedly different from their mum who pronounced wi-fi as "whiffy."

The difference between apple and orange, when we come to think about it, can be up to our interpretation. All we need to remember is never compare one with another. Apple is apple. Orange is orange. Pineapple isn't apple, either.