Shelved

Sue Matthews Petrovski

Description

Sue Petrovski has always been capable, thoughtful, and productive. After retiring from a long and successful career in education, she published two books, ran an antiques business, and volunteered in her community. When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and until her death eight years later, Petrovski served as her primary caregiver. She even cared for her husband when he also succumbed to dementia.

However, when Petrovski's husband fell ill with sepsis at the age of 82, it threw everything into question. Would he survive? And if so, would she be able to care for him and manage the family home where they had lived for 47 years? More importantly, how long would she be able to do so? After making the decision to sell their house and move into a senior living community, Petrovski found herself thrust into the corporate care model of elder services available in the United States.

In Shelved: A Memoir of Aging in America, she reflects on the move and the benefits and deficits of American for-profit elder care. Petrovski draws on extensive research that demonstrates the cultural value of our elders and their potential for leading vital, creative lives, especially when given opportunities to do so, offering a cogent, well-informed critique of elder care options in this country.

Shelved provides readers with a personal account of what it is like to leave a family home and enter a new world where everyone is old and where decisions like where to sit in the dining room fall to low-level corporate managers. Showcasing the benefits of communal living as well as the frustrations of having decisions about meals, public spaces, and governance driven by the bottom line, Petrovski delivers compelling suggestions for the transformation of an elder care system that more often than not condescends to older adults into one that puts people first—a change that would benefit us all, whether we are 40, 60, 80, or beyond.

Foreword

Preface

ONE: An Unexpected Page of Life

TWO: Sideswiped by Age

THREE: Choosing Our Tomorrow

FOUR: Turning the Page

FIVE: A Society of Strangers

SIX: There Is Life after Sixty-Five: for God’s Sake!

SEVEN: Reflecting on the Mountain

EIGHT: The Employment of Being Old

NINE: Last Times: Last Thoughts

Notes

Bibliography

Sujets

• Health Care Issues
• Memoir
• Health
• Fitness

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612494999
• Langue: English

Extrait

Shelved
A Memoir OF
AGING IN AMERICA
Shelved
A Memoir OF
AGING IN AMERICA
Sue Matthews Petrovski
Purdue University Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2018 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress.
Cloth ISBN: 9781557537898
ePDF ISBN: 9781612495088
ePUB ISBN: 9781612494999
Front cover art, Nana Shelf Portrait , courtesy of designer Darragh Casey.
Darragh Casey is an Irish designer maker currently living in London. His MA project, Shelving the Body , addresses the typology of the shelf with a physical consideration for the figure, subverting our relationships with furniture and reassessing the idea of the “user.” Recognized for its alternative design thinking, Shelving the Body has been widely exhibited, collected, and commissioned. His book of the same title, produced with Soapbox Press, documents the project from initial MA research to recent commissions.
Casey has worked with clients including Harley Street Clinic, Camper Shoes, Central Saint Martins, Vogue , and Van Cleef & Arpels. He also gives workshops and talks around his projects and critical design thinking. Casey currently works as a designer maker at Heatherwick Studio London.
For Kate Bullock Matthews, my paternal grandmother who only began to live at age sixty-five. And to Rudy Petrovski, my patient, generous husband of sixty-two years, who has always supported my impulsive ideas.
I dwell in possibility.
— E MILY D ICKINSON
Contents
Foreword
Preface
ONE  
An Unexpected Page of Life
TWO  
Sideswiped by Age
THREE  
Choosing Our Tomorrow
FOUR  
Turning the Page
FIVE  
A Society of Strangers
SIX  
There Is Life after Sixty-Five, for God’s Sake!
SEVEN  
Reflecting on the Mountain
EIGHT  
The Employment of Being Old
NINE  
Last Times, Last Thoughts
Notes  
 
Bibliography  
 
Foreword
My great-aunt May was, by any reckoning, a remarkable woman. She became a zoology professor in an era when women were discouraged from studying science, wrote a biology textbook that was used nationwide, did research that’s still cited by younger scientists, and was, in 1927, one of the first women to attend Indiana University’s School of Medicine. She quit medical school when she was hired as an assistant professor at Butler University, a job she held for forty-two years, and she had a long and loving marriage of equals. Aunt May supported her husband, Paul, in his medical practice, and he helped her collect specimens for her lab. They read aloud at night, falling asleep to the sound of one another’s voices rather than the television.
In part because she and Uncle Paul were never able to have children, and in part because other family members moved away, I was closer to her than most great-nieces are to their great-aunts; though not as close as I was to my grandmothers, I felt the responsibility. While for years I only visited her on Christmas, when she and her husband moved to a retirement community, I brought my children to have dinner with them once a month and ran errands and, after her husband died, became her next of kin, a surrogate daughter, and power of attorney. When the retirement community said it was time to move her from assisted living to the nursing unit, I was the one who signed the papers and was there on the day she moved. I’m ashamed to remember that I spent more time talking with the administrators at that time than I did with her about the move.
How did I feel about her? Proud, certainly. I knew her story. But if I admit it now, when I was in my forties I didn’t really see her. Our conversations were formal. After she moved to the nursing unit, I found myself talking slowly to her as though she were a child, the way the staff and nurses talked to her. Almost daily she was wheeled to arts and crafts activities fit for a five-year-old. This lifelong reader lived now with the television on because the attendants liked to watch TV as they went on their rounds. She had been young once, I knew that, but the only record of her youth consisted of black and white photos turning sepia, photos in which (because of hair and clothing styles) she looked old from late childhood on. Mortal. We crave new styles, I’m half convinced, so we will not be reminded when we look in the mirror of previous dying generations, so we will look to ourselves forever young.
And if her mind was still as sharp as it had been, I reasoned, why didn’t she complain? Why did she allow the television to stay on? Why didn’t she ask for the music she’d always loved, the books? Of course, I realize now, that I was the one who chose the things to move from her old apartment to her nursing home bedroom. I tell myself that I was busy. She was diminished, I thought, and I was focused on my own trip through this universe.
Still, there were glimmers that the woman I’d been told about for years was the same woman who sat in a wheelchair. Toward the end of her life, as she was looking out the window at the green of the natural world she’d spent her life studying, at the birds on the feeder, she looked at me for a moment and said she didn’t understand why she couldn’t be of some use. “I still,” she said, “have so much to offer to the world.”
The system was wrong, and at that moment we both knew this. But I had two children to raise and all I could do was stop by occasionally to see her and feel guilty. It was the one and only time I ever heard her complain.
I tell this story because reading Sue Petrovski’s book has allowed me, in retrospect, to see her final years as ones of grace and wisdom, perhaps as a legacy to her family and most assuredly a conscious legacy. It became her final purpose, this wish to cause the least amount of trouble to the young. “I don’t want to even put a straw in your path,” she said once as she asked for some small favor. Had I read this book before Aunt May’s death, I might have seen the woman I thought I knew but clearly didn’t. I might have understood, in part, the depth of her grief after losing her husband and why she didn’t burden me with that grief. Our conversations would have been richer. I missed a chance to learn from her and a chance to give more of myself. I missed my chance to know this remarkable woman.
I began to see how much I’d missed when I went through her papers after her death. I’d been storing boxes of them in my garage. In one box there was a folder of poems and passages of novels that were important to her, passages written on notebook paper and pressed, like the leaves she pressed between waxed paper. There were passages from Willa Cather and Shakespeare and from naturalists like Edwin Way Teale. One of the poems she kept was “A Handful of Dust” by the writer James Oppenheim. The second stanza begins “Handful of dust, you stagger me” and describes the world as it might have been seen by her, as a place “so full of the dead, / And the air I breathe so rich with the bewildering past.” The poet sees, in the natural world, the dust of Helen of Troy, of King David, and of the beloved girl to whom the poem is directed. “This is you,” he writes, “this of the earth under our feet is you. / Raised by what miracle? Shaped by what magic? / Breathed into by what god?”
To my great-aunt, life was a mystery speaking with voices of the past. “Listen to the dust in this hand. / Who is trying to speak to us?” Oppenheim writes. Listen to those voices, she might have said to me, and tread as gently and respectfully as you can. Or rather, as she did say to me, I now realize, in her actions.
We look at a group of elderly people in wheelchairs, with canes and walkers, and we don’t see the individuals they not only once were but still are. In Shelved , Sue Petrovski speaks for all our elders as she asserts her individuality and, most importantly, lets us hear her voice. Like my great-aunt, she does not complain. She does not put a straw in our path. She makes close friendships, a home, and shows us how her husband, in the early stages of dementia, is helped by the social and communal lifestyle. Even pointing out that a retirement community is communal in the way that moving into a college dorm is communal is a useful insight. The analogy changes the lens, brings with it the possibility of growth and change.
You will find useful information about aging and decision-making in this book, but ultimately it’s the voice of this graceful writer, and her insistence that despite being “shelved” a person can continue to live a life of meaning and purpose, that will change your perceptions of aging and of the aged. Like me, you may look at the faces of the aged, or your own inevitable aging, differently. And perhaps it will bring about change in the way we treat the elderly.
We need voices like Sue Petrovski’s in the same way we need the voices of all the marginalized. Our imaginations are so insular and so limited. You can look back through all the ages you’ve been and empathize with the hopes and fears of a twenty-year-old when you’re sixty, but the reverse is seldom true.
Or you can read books, books that expand your perception, your empathy for yourself and others. The book you hold in your hand now is a testament to hope and to the human spir