Learning How To Be Old Rachel McAlpine

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Today you'll hear an audiologist, an ornithologist, a theatre critic, myself and another poet talk about hearing aids: two common barriers and various life-enhancing benefits. We focus on the situation in Aotearoa New Zealand. (I'm Rachel McAlpine, a writer, not a scientist or health practitioner, so please do consult professionals and and do your own research.)



If you are almost old you may have mild to moderate hearing loss, like me—that’s normal. Today I have three guests: Wendy Poludore, an audiologist based in Wellington. Also, two people who need hearing aids for very particular reasons: Colin Miskelly, Curator of Vertebrates at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and John Smythe, Editor of Theatreview, which publishes online reviews of professional theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand.



Other interesting comments from readers of my blog, Write Into Life. And with her permission, I'll read a super poem on this topic by the American poet Rosemerry Wahtolla Trommer.







Resources:




Hearing New Zealand



Estimating the global costs of hearing loss



Hearing Aids May Slow Dementia Onset



A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Hearing Aids, Including the Benefits of Reducing the Symptoms of Dementia



Poem: When Bruce Told Me He’d Brought You Your Hearing Aids (Rosemerry Wahtolla Trommer)




Blog posts about hearing aids:




Touchy about hearing loss?



Joy of hearing aids

Hello, I'm Rachel McAlpine and I'm learning how to be old.



What makes a good conversation? How does that change as we get older? And why does that matter? I don't want to be the boring old person that nobody wants to talk to. Here to help me are 11 kind strangers and Kirsty Ferguson, who specialises in helping people talk through their own miscommunication. So, listen if you think you might be old one day!



To take the last one first, it matters heaps. Communicating frequently with other human beings is almost a matter of life and death at a certain age. Because a good conversation is an antidote to loneliness, and loneliness is literally a killer.




Antidote to loneliness: 7 real-life conversations a day



Harriet Lerner's Psychology Today blog: The Dance of Connection



What Kirsty Ferguson does






Transcript of this podcast episode: A Good Conversation



[Music] Hello, I'm your host Rachel McAlpine and I'm learning how to be old. And so are you, I think.



What makes a good conversation? And how does that change as we get older, if at all? And why does that matter?



To take the last one first, it matters heaps. Communicating with other human beings on a regular basis is almost a matter of life and death at a certain age. Because a good conversation keeps loneliness at bay and loneliness is a killer, literally.



What people think is a good conversation



Shhh! Listen to the people.




I think a good conversation is one that disarms you and gets you to speak about yourself and learn about another person.



I would say a good conversation is being able to have a good debate about something. So, yeah, listening to someone else's point of view and taking it on board and seeing if you can be swayed.



It should be as much listening as it is talking. [Bell rings]




My guest is Kirsty Ferguson, mediator



R. My guest today is Kirsty Ferguson from Te Whanganui-tara. Kirsty's going to help me look at how we communicate. And especially how we can improve our skills as we get older. She's very good at this personally and it's her job to help people resolve their disputes by talking to each other. Ferguson partners work with all manner of groups and organisations and restorative justice, mediation and dispute resolution. In other words, Kirsty's at the sharp end of communication helping other people.



My own dispute is with myself and my own conversational bad habits as an old person. And Kirsty has kindly agreed to give me a hand. Hello, Kirsty. Thank you for coming along and talking to me.



K. My pleasure. It's very lovely to be here, Rachel.



R. Particularly as you're a bit of an expert on communication, especially in tricky situations. And for this episode, I'm really interested in how we can get a few skills up our sleeve so that it's less likely that when we're old, this is sounding very convoluted, when we're old, when I'm really older than I am, I don't want to be the boring person that nobody wants to talk to. And I'm thinking I might be able to learn a bit in advance. You can help me, right?



K. Very happy to have a conversation and share some of the few things I've learned over the years.



R. I was also thinking about how conversation, how our skills change as we get older, even if we don't learn anything formally. And I remember, since I was one of six girls, so around the dinner table, we had to put our hands up to talk, not because our father was fierce, but because he wanted us all to have turns and we all wanted to talk all the time. Was it like that for you?



"Children should be seen and not heard"



K. Not quite so much for me. My family wasn't quite as compelling or compassionate. We were a little bit more seen and not heard, I think, at the dinner table. As I grew older, I was encouraged to speak and engage, but certainly I think that was the ethos of our family dinners. They weren't fun times, particularly.



R. Certainly my mother used to say, “little birds in their nes

Introducing a wise woman who approached her own extreme old age as an ongoing project. Eventually, she saw herself as a sturdy centenarian, even though she was frail. She developed a systematic method for dealing with the ever-increasing age-related changes in her body, mind and life. She was learning how to be old, and she blogged about it every week for 5 years. To her surprise, she found that facing old age honestly and openly was satisfying, even exciting. So today on this podcast I will read from the book-of-the-blog, and riff about it. I will do this again, because I am over-enthusiastic about Doris Carnevali's work.




2m 30s Introducing the sturdy centenarian



7m Birth of a blog



10m 10s Turning 95



13m Learning from these chapters



15m Highly engaged listeners



16m 20s Comments from readers




Contact and links




Comment on my website: scroll down to the Comments section.



Email me: rachel at writing dot co dot nz



Facebook: Rachel McAlpine, Learning How To Be Old



Happy 100th birthday, Doris!






Transcript for Learning from a Centenarian



[Music] Hello, I'm Rachel McAlpine, I'm 84 and I'm learning how to be old. And for some years, one of my most important teachers has been Mrs Doris Carnevali. I've never met her, although we have exchanged quite a lot of emails. Now Doris was an Associate Professor Emeritus at Washington University School of Nursing in Seattle and from the age of 95, she blogged pretty much every week about her personal experience of aging. I learned so much from Mrs Carnevali that I wrote a book based on her blog. She carried on blogging till she was a 100-year-old blogger! is a rarity by which time she perceived herself as frail in some ways and sturdy in other ways. So I called my book The Sturdy Centenarian.
Sometimes I won't have a guest on this podcast and instead I'm going to just read you something from this book, The Sturdy Centenarian. I'm sure I'll interrupt myself sometimes to make my own comments on the book to be realistic. I won't be able to stop myself because, well, Doris always gets me thinking and I know you're out there. So I want to share my thoughts with you. (If only you could share your thoughts back. You could do that on my Facebook page, Rachel McAlpine Learning How to Be Old.)
Anyway, I boiled the blog down to about half and I included about exactly 116 entries. Let's call them chapters. Hey, they might be good bedtime stories. Maybe I should try and read in a low, soporific voice that will send you to sleep. Maybe not. We'll see. OK, off we go.
The Sturdy Centenarian, Aging and Thriving with Doris Carnevali, edited by Rachel McAlpine. This is the introduction.
Meet the Sturdy Centenarian.
When I discovered Doris Carnevali’s blog, I was 78 and she was 96. There I found answers to some massive questions about extreme old age that I had never even thought about. How do you bake cookies when you're a walker? How do you maintain your self-esteem? Is old age really a state of stagnation? How do you build new relationships? How do you establish your credibility? How do you tackle the mounting impact of old age on your daily life? Why is it better to use neutral language when you talk about aging? Or how can a failing brain mitigate the impact of a failing brain? Can you thrive even when you are frail? What are the pleasures of extreme old age, if any?
Doris Carnevali used to be a professor at the Washington University School of Nursing and co-author of a textbook on nursing geriatric patients. Then she herself became an explorer, a resident and a reporter in that mysterious country, old age. Central to her story is a system she has developed for coping with the relentless advance of normal age-related changes. She calls this engaging with aging or EWA. Her system attracted attention from academics and carers but her blog is primarily for those who worry about their own old age and those concerned about elderly relatives.
When I stumbled across the

Today I’m learning how to be old from Jan Bolwell, a 74-year-old dancer and actor. For 25 years she has directed the Crows Feet Dance Collective, an amateur group of women who are dancing as we age. I asked Jan lots of nosy questions. You'll find out:




her grounding in two opposite types of dance



how to direct untrained older dancers



dancing as you age with two hip replacements and a double mastectomy



how audiences respond to older dancers on stage



and the extraordinary story of how Crows Feet began.




Finally, I learned something very special about self-consciousness while talking to Jan. At the end of the interview, it’s a great tip for when you start to notice yourself getting older. And it’s got nothing to do with dancing.





Crows Feet Dance Collective on Facebook

Hi, I'm Rachel McAlpine, I'm 84 and I'm learning how to be old. When vehicles get old, they need a certificate to prove they are safe on the road. Today I’ve got my grandson Hugo with me, he’s 12 years old and he’s going to help me renew my personal Warrant of Fitness. Like most young people, Hugo does know a lot about getting old, and he is very helpful. He is checking whether I can safely continue being out and about on roads and footpaths. Am I well maintained? Will I crash? Am I a danger to traffic? This seems reasonable, because my old body is a vehicle for myself, and I motor around on my legs.



Hugo and I find human equivalents for tyres, lights, bodies, seat belts, suspension, and so forth. We have a contest to see who can keep singing the longest. This is to test my lung capacity. Hugo sees himself as a Nissan GTR and I'm a Baby Austin. Or maybe an old VW Beetle. To pass our personal Warrant of Fitness we old people-cars don't need to be perfect: we just need to be as safe as possible for another 12 months.



Some organisations already offer a proactive medical check that they call a warrant of fitness. Buildings in New Zealand are required to have a Building or Housing Warrant of Fitness. Now I think we need a Warrant of Fitness specifically for old age. Of course it must be optional, not mandatory. One day! In the meantime, this rough-and-ready test will have to do.



This old saying is highly relevant: "A stitch in time saves nine." We heard that all the time in the 1940s, and everything got mended. Cars, socks, shoes, houses and now humans.



Another rare car-related blog post from me

Today — we’re lucky! Listen as oral historian Judith Fyfe shares insights and tips from her experience of recording older voices and stories. She says these recordings are like photographs: they capture a moment in time.



She answers questions such as, why even do it? Why are older people more valuable subjects than teenagers? Best process? Potential problems? And what to do with that precious recording? I also get some personal advice about recording interviews for this podcast.



I hope she'll inspire you to sit down with an older person, maybe a family member, maybe a friend. Establish trust, agree in writing about the purpose, get a good microphone, record in a quiet place, ask questions and above all ... listen. (Because "Tomorrow is too late.")



I’m Rachel McAlpine and I’m 84. Like you, I'm Learning how to be old.




Recording stories for a memoir



What I learned from interviewing nonagenarians



Life Stories Enhance the Quality of Life for our Seniors



Monash University study reveals health benefits of listening to elders' stories




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