The Engaging with Aging blog

We seniors are used to hearing from lots of experts on aging. Many of them focus on health issues: physical and mental changes, disease prevention, treatment, palliation. Others deal with psychosocial issues: loneliness, vulnerability, adjusting to loss. Most of these experts are not seniors themselves. But if there’s one thing many of us seniors have learned about aging, it’s that it’s unlike anything we imagined. We don’t really start to understand aging until we get there.

Enter Doris Carnevali, blogger extraordinaire. As a former nurse, nursing instructor and textbook author specializing in nursing management of the elderly, Doris brings a fine scientific mind and a wealth of knowledge and skill to apply to her own aging. But now in old age, she’s also keenly aware of what’s missing from that knowledge base. So in 2017, at age 95, she began to work out a personal, pragmatic approach to aging in her Engaging with Aging blog. Articulate, creative and uncompromisingly honest, Doris builds bridges between our age-related changes and our daily lives.

Aging can’t be prevented or cured. The aging process leads to a steady stream of physical and mental changes that affect our ability to manage our lives. How can we deal with these changes and live our lives as well as possible? Doris takes a completely personalized approach. She’s her own lab rat. When an age-related change begins to interfere with her life, first she tries to learn about it and understand it. Why are my hands getting weak? Why can’t I grip things securely? Then she analyzes which areas of daily living are being or are likely to be affected. Cooking, dressing? What related or helping capacities and assets do I have available to make the most satisfying adaptation to the new normal? I’m adaptable and resourceful, I can make foods that don’t need chopping, wear clothes that don’t have buttons. So instead of focusing on the loss, she’s dealing creatively with what the new situation is or can be. She’s constantly balancing challenges and resources.

There’s nothing simple about this. Adapting to age-related changes in our daily lives calls on all the critical thinking and resourcefulness we can muster. Over and over again, she demonstrates how she applies her model of thinking and problem-solving to her everyday life. As Doris shows us, aging is a school for grown-ups.