Youths Narrow Prism

Youths Narrow Prism
Seeing my bewildermentUSB Memory Stick, she smiled and went on to describe how she had endured decades in an unhappy marriage with a gruff, verbally abusive man.As she spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely off. In my misguided empathy I had committed what William James called the psychologist’s fallacy, assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone else is experiencingWorld of Warcraft Gold. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a life of sadness and decrepitude remained, and I felt bad about it.
But I was wrongnike shoes. She had not fallen into the abyss. She was glad to have finally won a measure of freedom and was determined to make the best of it. As her life unfolded at the nursing home over the next yearjordn shoes, she threw herself into new activities and relationships in a way that was quite unexpected.All of us lapse into such mistaken impressions of old age from time to time. It stems in part from an age-centered perspective, in which we view our own age as the most normal of times, the way all life should be. At 18 the 50-year-olds may seem ancientcustom made suit, but at 50 we are apt to say the same about the 80-year-olds.
This age-centrism is particularly pervasive in people’s attitudes toward nursing homesEd hardy. All too often we imagine that life seems to end at the nursing home door — that it is loveless and lonely, with death hovering close by.We make this mistake when we refuse to see the needs for intimacy even in the most debilitated elderlyBlister packaging. Our youth-centered culture equates love with sex; in contrast, I have seen with my older patients that love can be an endlessly blossoming flowerwow gold, felt and expressed in hundreds of ways.
A friend’s mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease has fallen in love with another resident on her floorbronze fountain, and they walk around holding hands and snuggling with a newfound innocence that perhaps only their memory loss restored.
We also project our terror of death onto the ageded hardy clothes, assuming that fear and depression must stalk the final years of life. And yet in my 15 years of working in nursing homes, I have never heard a patient say that he or she was afraid of death. Sometimes there is acceptance, other times anticipationreplica handbags, but most often it is not a great concern. Life goes on in its shadows.