LeadingAge - Dig the New Name for AAHSA
A tale of two names . . . LeadingAge vs. American Homes and Services for the Aging
LeadingAge is confident, bold, energetic. The other name: well, it's pretty tame, pretty safe, and pretty boring. Changing aging in America means stepping up and stepping out.
Congratulations to the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, which is putting a new name before its membership to much better reflect who the organization is on the Inside with a new name on the Outside . . . LeadingAge.
Stories in Living from the Obituary Page - Rev. Andrew Rogness
Stories of living and inspiration abound on the obituary page. Here's one today from John Brewer, a writer at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, about Rev. Andrew Rogness, 62, a Lutheran pastor in Roseville, Minn., who clearly made "home" for people by welcoming them. Blogging on the Prince of Peace Church web site, he wrote in one of his entries in February during his Stage 4 cancer about mortality:
. . . ."There are the usual 'bucket list' things to live for, like watching the Winter Olympics and college basketball's March Madness. But 'the most compelling reasons to fight for life, I'm discovering, are of a different kind," he wrote.
"I want to be here this coming July for my son's wedding - not so much for my sake as for his and his bride's sake. I want to be here in July for our 40th wedding anniversary, not just for my sake, but for my wife's," he wrot
"In short I believe the most compelling reason to live, no matter what each person faces in life, is to embrace the notion that we live for the sake of others. The Bible is filled with this notion of being stewards. Embracing this reason for life becomes more compelling when faced with the predicament of our own mortality."
When it was clear that Pastor Rogness wouldn't make it to his son's wedding, his son and fiancee got their marriage license and gathered their families in Rogness' hospital room. They read their vows, the homily he wrote, and he blessed their wedding. He died two hours later with his family singing hymns that he and his brothers Bishop Peter Rogness, head of the Saint Paul Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Stephen and the Rev. Michael Rogness sang as children.
Bishop Rogness told Brewer, "It was the most marvelous interweaving of life's joy and sadness, of ending and beginnings."
I'm New at Being Old by Lucy Rose Fischer
So many new ideas, careers and adventures are being launched through aging. When Lucy Rose Fischer was nearing 60, she became an artist after nearly 25 years as a researcher and author in the field of aging. Her new book, "I'm New at Getting Old" (Temuna Press) is getting rave reviews:
Here's Twin Cities book reviewer Mary Ann Grossman of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press on Fischer's work:
"I'm New at Being Old" is one of the prettiest, liveliest picture books of the season. Fischer expects it to resonate with the 40 million women, age 55 and older, " who look in the mirror and wonder: "Is that really me?"
Illustrated by Fischer's lively and colorful drawings, her text reads like poetry, with the narrator worrying about "losing my mind" because names slip from her brain. She writes of accepting her wrinkles and wondering where the time has gone. When she visits her elderly mother-in-law at a senior community, someone asks to her horror, if she's a new resident. But her tone is optimistic: "I'm in transition -- new at being old. Gingerly, I join the World of Older Women."
Writers Go After IMDb to Get Ages Removed - Get Hip to the Age Wave Hollywood
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is a great information source on movies. Apparently too much information is being shared in some film industry members' eyes. Fearing backlash from ageism in Hollywood, the Writers Guild of America is seeking removal of birthdates from the site.
In a country where people have much to contribute for much longer than ever before, we're competitively shooting ourselves in the foot with an ageist society.
LinkedIn for Senior Services and Aging
It would be beneficial for LinkedIn to add senior services and aging to its profession field. Thousands of people work in the U.S. senior services profession or the field of aging, but there's no category for it on LinkedIn. Find the age wave, LinkedIn. Please add senior services and aging as a "profession" category.
Try the Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator
This calculator doesn't take too long (5 to 10 minutes) and is kind of fun. It asks you 40 health history type questions and then gives you a calculation about the age destination you're currently on . . . Curious if you think it's any good.
Where is the Good Looking Commode and Other Durable Medical Equipment?
Why is so much medical equipment that more and more consumers are purchasing for their homes - not for an institution - look so cold and blah? Check out McKesson's web site for example. YUCK. . . . couldn't they dress up their shower chairs and commodes a bit (like the one above)? Maybe some color . . . .tell me why this is the best commode . . . Could we have a little bit of creativity folks . . . just a little.
Famed designer Michael Graves, who also is paralyzed, said this in an interview at Caring.com in response to why this is such a neglected area of design:
. . . . there hasn't been any competition. The makers just want to get it out on the market, even if it's only half right. But you can't act that way. I remember one of the design magazines had a competition for product of the year, and the only one in this area was a wheelchair. They gave it first place because there was nothing else. And it was just awful. The judges didn't know and the designer didn't know.
Someone is going to get this design stuff right, and people are going to buy their products. Note to McKesson and other durable medical product provides . . . you're creating a consumer product . . . more people want to live at home . . . Give us some new options.
New Study Says People Get Happier With Age
A happy customer at an Ecumen senior housing community
A new study says that people get happier with age. I totally believe that most people do. If you want a drug-free upper, visit a senior housing community. In the best communities you'll find people laughing, taking time to take time, and enjoying the moment. It's a stimulant.
More on the new study from the Scientific American blog:
General well-being (characterized by how people currently felt about their life) fell sharply through the age of 25 and tapered more gradually overall until the ages of 50 to 53. And by the early 70s, that wellbeing was back up to late-teen levels.
"As people age, they are less troubled by stress and anger," the researchers noted in their study, which was led by Arthur Stone, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University, and published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "And although worry persists, without increasing, until middle age, " they continued, "it too fades after the age of 50."
The data come from a 2008 phone survey performed by the Gallup Organization of 340,847 randomly selected adults aged 18 to 85. The respondents represented a fairly average slice of the U.S. population, with about 29 percent holding a college degree and a median monthly average household income between $3,000 and $3,999. During the call, participants were asked to rate how they currently felt their life stood on a scale of 0 ("the worst possible life for you") to 10 ("the best possible life for you"). They were then asked if they had felt different affective states (happiness, enjoyment, stress, sadness, anger and worry) "a lot of the day yesterday." Keeping questions to relatively current periods in time by asking about yesterday as opposed to the previous week, month or year helped the researchers avoid some of the retrospective bias that might have played a role in similar past studies.
Thank You to Randy Wanek and Jennifer Kohl
Life is short. It's a cliche, but such a fact, even when you live past the century mark.
Yesterday several hundred people packed a Fergus Falls church to honor Randy Wanek (pictured above), an Ecumen leader in Pelican Rapids, Minn. Randy died on Friday of cardiac arrest. He was only 55-years old. Last month we lost another colleague - Jennifer Kohl - who worked with us in White Bear Lake, Minn.
Life is short. And even though we all know it, and we all know we are going to die one day, it doesn't dull the loss people feel when the life of a person they care about ends.
Thank you to Randy and Jennifer for choosing to spend time with us during their precious time on this earth.
Jim Klobuchar - A Biking Hardhead Reforms
Photo: Jim Klobuchar and Ecumen CEO Kathryn Roberts at the recent Ecumen Leadership Conference
A lot of people will be biking this weekend; a Memorial Weekend treat follows from Ecumen blogger Jim Klobuchar. Have a great weekend!
I was raised to practice the creeds of confession and reasonable remorse as the safest way to deal with my fallibilities; also to reduce our incarceration time in purgatory. In later years I found this to be not only a modest code of conduct but a pre-emptive strategy to deal with the wails and catcalls of the more than 200 men and women who ride in the week-long bicycle tour that I organize.
It will be our 36th in June, begun in the mid 1970s when most of America was unaware of the joys of romping through the countryside on a multi-geared bicycle. It was so long ago that riders showed up in Oskosh b’Gosh pants, baseball caps and rubber tennis shoes. Everyone biked with a full load of gear in paniers hanging from the rear racks. There were no biking trails. We rode on dirt roads when the pavement ran out. One year the highway department scheduled a detour on the highway near Sauk Rapids, MN and we walked our bikes four miles through a cornfield.
One stubby little guy, who later became part of the lore of the ride, arrived with a beanie on his head topped by a little spinning propeller and wearing black street shoes.. The practical jokers of the ride were totally merciless. It was not unknown for one of our folks to check out his saddle bags after riding 35 miles to lunch-- and finding two 10-pound dumbbells neatly packed in his rainjacket.
Eventually we graduated into Tour ‘d France biking shirts and foot clips, 32-speed bicycles, lightweight helmets, GPS direction finders and heartbeat monitors. The ride became more than a ride. It is a now an open-ended reunion of people who have been doing it for years, who know all of the secrets of their road pals and are loosely united in the same way the survivors of the rack were united in the Middle Ages.
Most of them are still strong distance riders, many of them past the age of 50, 60, 70 and more.But they do remember the early years when we went 100 miles a day, or then 90 and later 75. They sent focus groups to negotiate with me, appealing for humane distances.
The turning point came 15 years ago when we began in a hot wind out of Monticello in central Minnesota heading for the town of Osakis, 87 miles away. The wind was coming straight out of the northwest, at least 25 miles an hour. Coincidentally it was exactly the direction we were going.
We lunched in the basement of a little church en route. People slept on the floor for more than an hour. By midafternoon a cloudburst struck and by 9 p.m. most of us, drenched, reached park where we camped. At 10 p.m.somebody rattled my tent and asked if I was the leader of this biking group.
“Why do you want to know?”
“There’s a guy on the phone at the police station who needs to talk to you,” he said.
It turned out to be one of my riders, wanting to know if his wife had called, worried about him.
“Why are you phoning? We’re here in the park in Osakis. Where are you?
“I’m in Grantsburg, Wisconsin.”
“What are you doing in Wisconsin?”
“When I started out in that wind, and we stopped for lunch at the little church in Rice, and then you all went back into the headwind—it nearly blew my off the bike. I said ‘these people are crazy.’ So I turned around and headed strait east for Wisconsin. It was a 25-mile an hour tailwind. All the way. It was glorious. I was totally happy. I’m still happy. I’m halfway through a T-bone steak. If my wife calls—“
I told the cop if his wife called, tell her to try all the motels in Grantsburg. The cop thought that was nice and chivalrous.
But I did conduct an examination of conscience the next year. You will be delighted to learn that the average distance of our six days in the bluff country of southeastern Minnesota will be 42 miles a day, and my popularity has suddenly soared.
About Jim Klobuchar, Ecumen "Changing Aging" contributor: In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.