Opinion by Ron Kokish My son and 10-year-old grandson were skiing expert terrain on an unfamiliar mountain. When they arrived at a particularly risky slope dad said, “Wait here until I get to the bottom, then follow my line down.” Dad descended and turned to wave his son forward only to see the boy already […]
Mature Content
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Mature Content: Whose life is it, anyway? — Third and final part
By Ron Kokish “A time to love and a time to die” … Ecclesiastes 3:2 At 85, my father was failing badly enough for his doctor to insist he stop driving. A few months later I called and casually asked how he was feeling. “Fine, physically,” he replied, “but life is hell when you don’t […]
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Mature Content: Whose death is it, anyway? Part II
By Ron Kokish Freedom means having options throughout our lives, including the time during which we are dying. Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) increases our options. Unfortunately, it was not yet legally available in the 1980s, when my friend Dorothy’s father, Michael, died of cancer; so, Michael had no legal option for obtaining prescribed medication […]
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Mature Content: Whose death is it, anyway?
By Ron Kokish Charlie was 10 the day he came home from school to find his father Hugo dead in their Montreal living room, an empty whiskey glass on the table and a cigarette still smoldering between two fingers. Hugo’s decision to overdose was tragic and understandable. Fleeing the Third Reich with his wife in […]
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Adjust, accommodate, repeat: Part two
By Larry Bogatz Mature Content is a monthly feature from the Carbondale AARP Age-Friendly Community Initiative (CAFCI). I appreciated Marty Gallagher’s Mature Content column last month: “Adjust, Accommodate, Repeat.” We do this all our lives, in ways both great and small, from the moment we leave the womb till we breathe our last. It often […]
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Mature Content: Praising the power of pets
Nancy Peterson worked as a registered veterinary technician, trained dogs for people with disabilities and was the Community Cats Program Manager for The Humane Society of the United States, the nation’s largest animal protection organization. She serves on the boards of the National Kitten Coalition and Neighborhood Cats and is a kitten foster care provider […]
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Aging today: Playing a strong hand
By Ron Kokish When it comes to aging, America has changed. Thanks mostly to a reduction in childhood mortality, more than 80% of Americans born in 1957 lived to be 65 this year. At over 54 million, the 65+ group is now almost 17% of the country. In contrast, in 1940, when the first Social […]
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A miracle in the Bronx
Of course there’s a Santa Claus. I saw him up close in the Bronx, in 1959, in the employee bathroom at Alexander’s Department Store. We stood silently, as men do at adjoining urinals, finished our business and returned to our work: he to the Children’s Department on the second floor, I to Women’s Blouses and […]
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Mature Content: Aging well in the mountains
By Nancy Roen For me, this time of year is a time for counting blessings, remembering over 50 years ago when I lived in Colorado and visited Carbondale and sent down tap roots. I was struck then by the similarities between the landscape and ethos of the area with the Mexico of my youth. Now […]
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From a great granddaughter
When things go as we want, our last developmental task is making sense of the life we lived, weaving that sense into something approaching wisdom and passing it along to the generations following us. Now, it is their privilege and obligation to lead. We have moved to the rear, but it is still our obligation […]