our later years
TRANSCRIPT
Our Later YearsBy: Jessica Kazanovicz
“The quality of our lives often depends more on our health than on our age.”
Eat well
Exercise
Strong social contacts
Feminization of Aging
Women live nearly seven years longer than men; increasing numbers of women are living eighty or more years.
Along with the benefits come certain problems:
Chronic illness, increased dependence on medical care, care giving or needing care, insufficient economic resources, and possibly surviving one’s partner, relatives, and closest friends.
Retirement: age 65-67
Loss of a Partner
Large numbers of women outlive their husbands, often by a decade or two.
More than 11 million women constitute over 80% of the U.S. widowed population.
Widows are vulnerable to disease and often lose or cannot afford health insurance coverage.
Grieving process takes a while, along with the surrounding situations. Writing, and talking about the
loss helps.
Getting Medical Care
Health care is needed when we age, because older women face physical, emotional and social changes and challenges that require specialized training and care.
Women who have health insurance under a spouse's employment-related health plan can lose coverage when a spouse retires.
Establish good communication with the health care provider.
Health care providers may judge older women’s complaints and health problems to be neurotic, imaginary or inevitable far more than men’s at an earlier age.
Physical Impairments and Chronic Conditions
Everyone ages differently
New medical advances making problems in the past now treatable.
Getting Around may include devices such as walkers and wheelchairs
Sensory loss, eye sight, distance, cataracts, glaucoma, detached retina, diabetic retinopathy, hearing, joints and feet, foot problems, bones, falls and fractures.
Struggling for survival can be more disabling to health and well-being than medical conditions.
Isolation from family and friends, caring for home, poor medical care due to high costs, income, social security Medicare and poverty.
Depression
Because women live longer, we are vulnerable to life events that cause sadness and even depression: loss of a spouse or partner, poverty, chronic illness, isolation and loneliness.
Memory Changes
Memory is the sharpest and quickest in our first 25 years, the brains capacity to reorganize and grow connections continues throughout life.
Memory problems are more pervasive as we age. It takes more conscious effort to gather, learn, and recall details. It may take a few moments to remember a name, and much later, it
may take even longer for facts to surface.
Prevention: brain exercise such as word games, crosswords and jigsaw puzzles or drawing. A healthy diet is also important.
“There’s nothing wrong with my memory – it’s all in there. Its only the retrieval system that’s a little slower.”
Caregiving
Women are the primary caregivers
Women accept and even except that others will depend on us, yet many of us fear becoming dependent on others.
Caring for one’s parents can create stress, physical strain and exhaustions. Family caregiving means that you will be providing care in isolation, without pay or supportive services, with no one to take over when you need a break, and possibly without job or even health insurance.
It can also be very satisfying
Those who care for aging parents need help as well
Caregiving
Alternative living arrangements: Living with others (relatives, family, friends) can be cost-effective and care-effective, because housemates can look out for one another, rather than paying for others to do so.
Assisted Living: Facilities that provide rooms or apartments as well as a range of services in a communal setting, a middle ground for elderly people who need care.
Life Care: These communities offer apartment living for people in relatively good health, with medical and social services nearby and assisted living units and a nursing home on the premises.
Nursing Homes: Need for constant nursing care. Only 5% of elders live in nursing homes, but 75% of those who do are women.
Right to Die
Do you believe one has the right to choose the means of their own death?
Permitting suicide shouldn’t be a way for the medical system to shrink its responsibility to provide support and comfort to the dying.
Some people prefer to die surrounded by family and friends. Some may be thinking about taking a fatal substance.
It is a complex issue
Hospice Care
Hospice – and hospice services at home – are intended as a humane alternative to hospital or nursing home end-of-life care.
Comforts the dying, rather than prolonging life
Survival Skills
We are adaptable. We may never “get over” set-backs, but it’s possible to continue living well.
We can’t deny human mortality and the physical changes we experience.
In our later years many of us feel more entitled than ever before to do what pleases and satisfies us, to slow down, to let go of the strain of former obligations and to express thoughts and feelings more strongly than ever before.