Things I’ll Do Differently When I’m Old
Voices
By STEVEN PETROW DEC. 5, 2017
Soon after my 50th birthday, 10 years ago, I started keeping a list of “Things I will do/things I won’t do when I get old.”
It was a highly judgmental, and super secret, accounting of all the things I thought my parents were doing wrong. My dad lied chronically about taking his meds. He refused to get a hearing aid, telling others to “up their audio” (he had been a television producer). My mom smoked behind my back (she thought) until the day she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
It was all too easy to call them out, and I recognized over and over just how awful it is to become feeble, sick and increasingly absent-minded, or worse.
Over the next decade I accumulated many pages of dos and don’ts, even as I fretted about exactly when I’d be old enough to start following my own advice. Recently I heard a sociologist on the radio call people in their early 60s, “the young old.” I imagine that my “young adult” nieces might consider me “old, old” already, but I don’t feel ready yet to start taking my own advice. I’m still working on building my list, not implementing it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/well/family/thing-ill-do-differently-when-im-old.html?ribbon-ad-i...
Life's a Journey, not a Destination" Aerosmith