Counting On Kindness

Wendy Lustbader

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439118498
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Seattle mental health counselor Lustbader here compells attention to and sympathy for those who must rely on caregivers for their needs. Stories are related bypatients themselves. From incapacitated men and women we learn of the humiliations caused by the loss of autonomy, of the frustrations at not being able to manage on one's own. Accounts from widely different sorts of patients and those who begrudgingly or willingly see to their care provide graphic lessons in sensitivity.

Notes

Preface

1 Martin Tolchin, “When Long Life Is Too Much: Suicide Rises Among Elderly,” The New York Times, July 19, 1989, p. 1.

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), 15.

3 Alice M. Rivlin and Joshua M. Wiener, Caring for the Disabled Elderly: Who Will Pay? (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1988), 5.

ONE A Desert of Time

1 Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 41.

2 May Sarton, The House by the Sea (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), 27.

3 Kathleen Fischer, Whiter Grace: Spirituality for the Later Years (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 24.

4 Alan H. Olmstead, Threshold: The First Days of Retirement (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 176-77.

5 Alan H. Olmstead, pp. 180-81.

6 Ruth Howard Gray, Survival of the Spirit: My Detour Through a Retirement Home (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 39.

7 Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 106, 120.

8 Robert L. Rubinstein, Singular Paths: Old Men Living Alone (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 100.

9 Harriet Robey, There’s a Dance in the Old Dame Yet (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982), 47.

10 Harriet Robey, pp. 47,48.

11 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 104-5.

12 This passage from “Gifts” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted by James D. Wallace in Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 154.

13 Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 263.

14 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), III, 591-92.

15 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 70.

16 Mario Milletti, Voices of Experience: 1500 Retired People Talk About Retirement (New York: Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund, 1984), 118.

17 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, act 5, scene 4.

18 Michael Drury, Counter-Clock-Wise: Reflections of a Maverick (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 1987), 48.

19 Malcolm Cowley, The View from 80 (New York: The Viking Press, 1976), 12.

20 Robert L. Rubinstein, p. 32.

21Odell Shepard, Ed., The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 100-101.

22 Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1979), 276.

TWO The Quality of Mercy

1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1962), 50.

2William Morris, Ed., The American Heritage Dictionary (New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1969), 821 and 1529.

3 Nancy Mairs, Plain Text (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1986), 15.

4 James J. Dowd, “Aging as Exchange: A Preface to Theory,” Journal of Gerontology, Vol. 30, No. 5, 1975, pp. 587-90.

5 Jo Ann Miller, “The Sandwich Generation,” Working Mother, January 1987, p. 48.

6 Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 119.

7 Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956), 162.

8 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946), 104-6.

9 Donald M. Frame, Trans., The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), 612.

10 Excerpts from the writings of William Posner are quoted by Mary Buckley in The Aged Are People, Too (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), 79.

11 James D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 156.

12 Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 268.

13 Barbara Myerhoff, “Surviving Stories: Reflections on ‘Number Our Days,’” Tikkun, Vol. 2, No. 5, November/December 1987, p. 20.

14 Leon Roth, Judaism: A Portrait (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), 24.

15 Ruth Howard Gray, Survival of the Spirit: My Detour Through A Retirement Home (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 34.

16 Ruth Howard Gray, p. 38.

17 William James, Essays in Pragmatism (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1957), 78.

THREE Bodily Terms

1 Albert Memmi, Dependence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 3.

2 Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 9.

3 Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 29.

4 Derived from “Riding the Gale,” a documentary about a New Zealand woman adapting to multiple sclerosis. Produced by Genni and Kim Batterham. Distributed by Filmmakers Library, Inc., 124 East 40th St., New York, NY 10016.

5 Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute, 1980), 15.

6 Martha Cleveland, Living Well: A Twelve-Step Response to Chronic Illness and Disability (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 18.

7 Andrew Malcolm, This Far and No More (New York: New American Library, 1987), 75...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• ONE A Desert of Time
• TWO The Quality of Mercy
• THREE Bodily Terms
• FOUR The Worth of the Past
• FIVE Parents Dying
• SIX Unlived Life
• SEVEN Refusing to Be Demeaned
• EIGHT The Fiction of Independence
• NINE Prospects for Revival
• CONCLUSION The Measure of a Good Life
• Notes
• Index