DEMENTIA, AGING, CAREGIVING; 12 Books I Recommend

Last in a three part-series on Dementia. 
See part 1, "Dementia: What Dickens Knew" here  
See part 2, "Dementia: Visiting the Cleveland Clinic and Beyond" here

 When I face the new stages of life, which are often the old stages, I read. Like childbirth and cancer, the old age stage is filled with horrid unfounded tales told by our contemporaries. Books can be filled with untruths too, but can be fact-checked and considered at length and close at hand. I tend to appreciate authors who provide both personal experience and research, especially statistics and references. Here are a dozen titles whose books I have benefited from, some going back to my sister’s fight with cancer 2000-2002 and my mother’s all too brief illness and death with pulmonary fibrosis in 2008 up to my father’s current dementia.

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My Top Two

 

My top two are Katy Butler’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2013) and Atul Gawande’s On Being Mortal (2015). I found Butler’s book through her essay “What Broke My Father’s Heart” (in Best American Essays 2010) about her family’s struggles with her father’s dementia. The essay first appeared in the NewYork Times .

What I like best about this book is Butler’s stunning use of facts about the medical establishment and especially how much of our care is driven--misdriven, careening into walls, smashed-- by our health care system. (This was all before Obamacare, so I am not going to be blaming it, which has at least provided some health care for thousands and thousands who never had it.) For example, her father’s specialist was paid thousands of dollars (counting a gold-plated watch) for every pace-maker he put in, but her father’s lifetime GP could not be paid for an appointment to explain why the pace-maker was not a good option for him. This book is heart-wrenching, factual and so well-written. 

More recent and my current favorite is On Being Mortal (2015).  Now, I have been smitten with every article and book on health that Dr. Gawande has written, and I am chauvinistically pleased that he is an Ohio boy, born and raised in Athens. More to the point, though, he is now a surgeon in Boston and a medical professor at Harvard. Everything he writes is filled with his common sense, clear prose, and many case studies and facts. In this book, among studies of his patients and other doctors’ patients, he also gives stories at length about his own parents and other family members. The book is divided into sections on topics such as independent living, assisted living, and hospice. While recognizing some of the worst practices, the book reflects most on best practices and some fascinating history, including the story of the woman who founded the concept of assisted living. Gawande's account of his own father’s decline led me to see that he has definitely walked in my shoes, a few paces ahead of me, and I am glad for his wisdom and practices that I can try to follow. Katherine Boos’ blurb on the book sums it up perfectly: “A deeply affecting, urgently important book—not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.”

Then, ten more books, in alphabetical order by author:

Ira Bycock. The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (2009). Bycock is a doctor specializing in palliative care, whose writing and work is in trying to get us to think and talk about the end of life. He has convinced me that more palliative care might make for less euthanasia. He has seen that palliative care can cure needless suffering and in some cases, actually helps people live longer and if not longer, to have better deaths. Certainly palliative care would have ended the terrible pain that my mother had the last week of her life when she was refused palliative care by both her GP and her specialist, who claimed she had 5-7 years to live and who never witnessed her suffering. 

Roz Chast. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (2014).  I am not a big fan of cartoon memoirs, nor graphic novels, nor their ilk in many categories, but I am a fan of Chast’s New Yorker work. I could not relate to Chast’s distance and seeming disapproval of her parents’ lives, of what seemed her driving force, guilt. But I very much related to the dynamic she depicts where we all fluff off the discussions that Bycock is trying to get us to have. I am hearing my generation repeat the same useless lines of my parents: “When I get to the point where I can’t do anything but___ [fill in the blank with: watch televisions, go to a nursing home, live on IV’s….], just shoot me.”  Chast's whole book, starting with the title,  reflects this attitude of her parents. Read it and weep and then start talking, to your kids if not your parents.

Charles Dickens. Little Dorrit (1855, among his many novels with elderly characters, pleasant and not). Supposedly George Bernard Shaw once said that this book is “more seditious than Das Kapital,” and while Shaw probably meant the novel’s portrayal of poorhouses, the character of Mr. Dorrit in relationship to Mr. Nandy provides a clear and seditious treatment of what Pipher (see below) calls “the old old” by “the young old.” In addition, the portrayal of Mrs. Plornish, Nandy’s daughter, shows an adult child who reveres her father and tries to do best by him in her father's difficult economic circumstances along with her own. 

  

Doty, Mark. Heaven’s Coast (1997) and Dog Years (2007). Doty had many years of caregiving for his partner who died of AIDS, for other friends, and for his aging dogs. What was most useful to me was his criticism of some the bossier hospice providers, while still appreciating hospice. His words comforted me in the aftermath of my sister’s and mother’s negative experiences with hospice. Doty, for example, notes of the hospice provider who started to hint that his lover should talk about “letting go,” “Doesn’t it make sense that we might wish to have these conversations, if we wish to have them, with people we love?”

Steven Henry Goldring, Unbelievable (2010). This self-published book doesn’t deal with aging, but it does show in clear, hair-raising detail how family members can turn on relatives and have them committed to institutions unnecessarily. Many of the elderly are threatened with commitment by sons and daughters, as well as by government agencies, as I have written about on this blog. I once heard a former teacher of mine, living across the hall from my father, being screamed at by his daughter, “If you even think of removing me as your POA, I will have you declared mentally incompetent.” Steven Goldring managed to extricate himself and is living much more healthfully ever after, with humor and grace.  

Jacoby, Susan. Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (2007). Like Katy Butler, Susan Jacoby is here to tell us that living longer is not the best of all possible worlds, though much of our national conversation and medical practice would make us believe so. An author of nine other well-researched books, many on history, she provides American history to show that we are a youth-oriented culture and current examples to show we are burying our heads in the false sands of how young we can stay forever if we just live right. She is trying to get us to lift our heads and look death in the eye.  

Dr. Kenneth A. Kosik, The Alzheimer’s Solution: How Today’s Care Is Failing Millions and How We Can Do Better (2009). I stumbled upon this book in the library when I was first facing my dad’s situation after the death of my mother, who had been making up for his memory loss as he was making up for her physical weakness. And while this book had so much more, my reading focused on his analysis of how much money the drug companies are making on Alzheimer’s medicine that shows no clear clinical proof of working, only anecdotal evidence. It’s been a big influence on me. Researchers continue to search for a drug that will work, which I’d love to see. This week, NPR had a story on two new ones they will begin testing on humans in 2016, and I’d love to see them work, for me maybe, if not in time for my dad.

Dennis McCullough. My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing “Slow Medicine,” A Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aging Ones (2007). A geriatrician for many decades, McCullough, like Butler and Bycock, believes that much of our super-duper expensive, end-of-life care is chosen out of an uninformed, crisis-like atmosphere. Like Bycock, he is in favor of palliative care, and both of them, unlike the doctor and family that Iwitnessed in my father’s presence, are motivated more by the patient’s comfort than the family’s or institution’s desire to get it all over with.  Also, his emphasis is on the adult children helping the parents to navigate the confusing waters of elder care, and not to wait, as Chast's family did, until so late in the process but to start having the conversations early. I also love his admonition for adult children to remain in attendance during their parents' hospitalizations. Dr. McCullough notes, “Most geriatric doctors I know would not want their own parent in a hospital without a family member in attendance at all times.” He is good at recommending movies and quoting poems that are apt for these situations.

Mary Pipher, Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (1999). This book is a little older than the others, and it comes from a clinical psychologist who sometimes, honestly, seems a little flakey to me. However, I really like and respect how she tries to get the younger generation to see that much of their difference from the older generation is based in different world views that are legitimate on both sides. (Many of the younger generation just like to think they are so much smarter than their parents.)  For example, she says, our parents’ generation is “pre-irony,” clearly a different way of looking at situations. Like me, she has always genuinely liked older people.“In America, we are xenophobic toward our old people,” she notes. She also makes an interesting distinction between the young old and the old old-- the former being, well me, someone 60 or older who still has good health and the latter, those who are old but with health issues. Like McCullough, she salts her writing with quotes from literature, which is a relief because her own writing style is a little wearing. 

Laura Wayman, A Loving Approach to Dementia Care: Making Meaningful Connections with the Person Who Has Alzheimer's Disease or Other Dementia or Memory Loss (2011). Honestly, this one seems a little flakey at times, too, and a bit over-focused on one way to deal with dementia. However, having seen many unloving approaches to dementia care, I have to rate this one loving and worth reading, especially for two things. First, Wayman focuses on the caregivers, and how they need to take care of themselves. Second, she has very practical suggestions for those who are having difficulty responding to parents and patients who are mentally in another world, maybe not able to recognize the world they physically live in, maybe not even their own adult children. 

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That's my list for now. Please feel free to post in "Comments" any titles I am missing. I'd love to see suggestions for poems, novels, and movies that treat the topic of aging and caregiving, too.

DEMENTIA: Visiting the CLE Clinic & Beyond

Second in a 3-part series on Dementia. 
See part 1, "Dementia: What Dickens Knew" 
See part 3, Dementia: 12 Books I R3ecommend"

Not content with the diagnosis and treatment my father was receiving at his assisted living home, I made an appointment for him to have a medical evaluation at the Cleveland Clinic. This is a brief summary of our original three appointments five years ago and an update.

THE FIRST APPOINTMENT

At our first appointment at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Geriatric Medicine, we met with Dr. F, who asked Dad why he was there, what he wanted. My father, who seldom cries, said through tears that he wanted to go home.

And who could blame him. He had spent six weeks in skilled nursing, where he had been unceremoniously dropped off from a hospital analysis for a stroke, which hospital testing records show he did not have. Six weeks is how long Medicare would pay for ensuing rehab care. It was not a good place and has since been shut down.

His roommate had been dying of a painful skin cancer, and he moaned a lot. To block the noise, the staff left the man’s TV on at a volume above his moans, 24-hours a day. The fact that my father was able to sleep at all is a tribute to his incapacity for insomnia. He has always slept like the proverbial rock unlike his insomniac wife and eldest daughter.

One day, when I was visiting, the man’s son met with his father on behalf of the family, to ask him to give up treatment. The man did not want to go that route, and the son pointed out that under the doctor’s orders, he wouldn’t be able to have his nightly drink, and the son couldn’t imagine the father wanting to lead a life like that. An hour later, other family members and the doctor came in to pitch the man on giving up treatment. This whole conversation was carried on in our hearing, a thin curtain between, and when I tried to leave with Dad, I was told he had to stay in his room. Nothing was ever said about hospice or pain management, which I could not see that the man was getting beyond turning up the volume on the TV. He died a few days later, at night, in the room with my father.

After the six weeks were up, Dad had moved into an Assisted Living apartment, but he was not happy there.

Dr. F said that they would proceed slowly, set up an appointment for the next month to assess Dad’s memory loss. He told us that while Alzheimer’s could not yet be determined till autopsy, they had a battery of tests that could ascertain where in the brain the loss was occurring, and that would provide an indication of what kind of dementia we were dealing with, if that is what we were dealing with since other things cause such memory failures and too often don’t get diagnosed. Then, the third month, whatever they determined Dad was capable of, they would get set up for him to do, including going back to his home, if he wanted.

“And I want to drive,” Dad said.

“Okay,” Dr. F answered. “If you are able to do that, there is a place in Youngstown where you could go to brush up on your skills, since it has been some weeks since you have driven.”

With a touch of anger he seldom expresses, my father said, “I never had an accident or a ticket my whole life.”

And then, in a gesture and tone of kindness I will never forget, Dr. F leaned forward, placed his hand lightly on Dad’s forearm, looked him right in the eye, and said, “Mr. Kendig, no one here is criticizing your driving in the past in the least.  Never having a ticket or an accident in all those years is a very good record. What we want to do is make sure that you can manage safely now, for yourself and for others.” His calmness dissipated Dad’s irritation.

The doctor looked over Dad’s list of medications and pointed out that two could be discontinued, especially the Aricept, as they would be testing for dementia at the next appointment. He wrote orders to the home to cancel those two medications.

As we left that afternoon, my father was smiling in the cold Cleveland January sun as he said to me, “He listened to me. No one listens to me any more. He really listened.”

When we returned to the Assisted Living facility and I gave the written orders to a nurse there, she said nothing, but, I came to learn the following month, the doctor she would be handing them to was not about to listen.

THE SECOND APPOINTMENT

Dad and I first met with a psychologist, Dr. P, who was sterner and more emotionally distant than Dr. F. However, some emotion came through as he looked over the accompanying paper work from the Assisted Living institution and then looked up at me, and said in a very surprised voice, “Dr. F asked the residence to cancel the Aricept, and they have responded by doubling it.” He shook his head and went on to ask some preliminary questions of Dad. Then he described how the day would go. Basically he would be handing us off to a psychometrist  who would perform the tests that Dr. P had ordered and would later evaluate—no MRIs or scans, but series of questions and exercises that could determine where in the brain the memory loss was located. Hours of tests, with brief rests and a longish lunch break in between. 

Since I didn't  go into the testing rooms, I don’t have much to report from this day. Dad and I showed up in the waiting room and sat with families getting active sons tested for behavioral issues, a woman getting tested after an accident, and other elders like my father. Dad's psychometrist, a young woman, whisked Dad away and told me to come back at lunch time, which I did. After lunch, we returned for another hour and a half of testing, and then we left for the day with an appointment for the following month. 

THE THIRD APPOINTMENT 

Our third and final appointment, we were back in Dr. F's office. In the interim, his staff by phone had guided me through the process of enabling Dad to get off the two prescriptions which they felt were unnecessary.

Dr. F first reviewed the results of the February tests. In short, Dad clearly had mild to moderate memory loss. It was located in a different part of the brain than Alzheimer's memory loss, and Dr. F thought Dad was probably experiencing vascular dementia, from a heart attack he had had in the 1990's. Dr. F also noted that at Dad's age, the chances of developing Alzheimer's increased exponentially every five years, and the psychologist had suggested that the family contact the Alzheimer's organization for information for the future.

Meanwhile, Dr. F said Dad had been paying bills and getting to appointments and perhaps with some assistance, Dad could return to his home if he wanted.  At this point, where would he like to live? To my surprise, Dad said he wanted to stay in his Assisted Living apartment and he was content with not driving. And yet, it wasn't too surprising. He had been lonely since Mom's death, and he was appreciated as quite the character he is in his new home.

That established, Dr. F moved onto treatment. Basically his general philosophy seemed to be to avoid as much medicine as possible and to get physical exercise. It seemed simple, and though it hasn't always been, it beats a lot of side effects of medicine.

In fact, Dr. F is a well-known advocate for exercise for seniors. He asked Dad about getting exercise, and while Dad had been very active before going into the Senior Residence, he was not allowed to walk outside there. He was being considered an escape risk since his unhappy skilled nursing days and the only exercise routine there was very minimal—head rolls and finger stretching.  So the doctor wrote orders for Dad to walk a mile a day. (When we returned to the facility, the administrative nurse was actually pleased with that order and offered to walk with Dad the first week.)

And he told Dad to cut down on his eating, not to cut out anything but just cut down. I had to smile as those had been my mother's orders for Dad at many times in his life, one sandwich instead of two in his lunch box, for example. (And Dad really took the doctor's words to heart, as he had taken Mom's, and cut out all the snacks that were being perpetually served in his residence.) Dad was to return in six months and see how his health and his memory loss were going.

SIX MONTHS LATER

 

In the six month appointment that followed, the Clinic's informal memory test showed Dad holding his own, no change, as did the tests a year later. Clearly, he had some dementia, but it wasn't progressing, and he maintained his personality and his memory for the people in his life. He was walking a mile a day, and he had lost eight pounds.

FIVE YEARS LATER, an update

 

This morning, five years later, my neighbor thanked me for recommending the Cleveland Clinic for her daughter-in-law’s elderly father, whom she thought was being over-medicated by his local physician. “They took him totally off two of his medications and pointed out several others which did not have to be taken daily, as he was taking them, but only as needed. And they recommended exercise.” The family despaired that their father would ever exercise, but he shocked them all by taking up Dr. F's recommendation to walk daily. It has increased his strength so that he can get down and up and around better than before, and he feels better. They are beginning family discussions of how he would like his life to go from here.

Less medicine, more exercise:  the same recommendation Dad got seems almost too simple a prescription from such a famous institute of health...except it has worked for him and many elders. Now, at 90, Dad has gotten five good years out of that advice, when otherwise, he might have been over-medicated and bound to a walker or a wheelchair, as is almost everyone else in his residence. He has lost half a point on the memory index, but that seems great for five years. We'll take it. The bad news is that the institution has totally discouraged walking, and his weight is back up, which wouldn't be so bad in itself except his breathing is labored and he misses the walks.

He comes once or twice a week to his former house which I bought and live in and where we have dinner together and he watches the baseball game or the hopeless Browns. (Thank goodness LeBron is back.) We go to the farmer's market or a concert or to Sippo Lake, which he helped to establish as a county park in his years on the zoning board. He has been to two of his WWII biennial reunions in Cleveland and Savannah (and New Orleans coming up!) He has been to every yearly Pro-Football Hall of Fame Parade here in Canton and one of the games, and he flew on the last Honor Flight out of Canton to Washington, D.C. He sings in a choir and leads a discussion at his assisted living place; he refuses to play bingo despite entreaties to join in. 

One of my high school teachers said to me recently, "I couldn't believe it. I walked into your dad's place, and he knew me right away, said, 'Hi, Louie!'" Of course he does. He has seen nearly all of Louie's past 50 musical productions. He loved this year's production of The Adam's Family. He recalls the names of most people from his past when he sees them, including most of the 50 of the people who showed up for his 90th birthday party at Sippo Lake. And he recalls the names of few to none of the people in his residence, including the three women he plays cards with every weekday evening. 

A lot of this is luck, I know. A story on NPR this week cites a new study showing women to be more vulnerable than men to Alzheimer's, both in acquiring it and declining faster with it. And several men and women have come, worsened, and gone from Dad's residence to Memory Care and death in his time there.

So I don't mean to suggest that getting off medicine and taking a walk is going to work for everyone. As my sister was in decline with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, we were stunned by the unkindness of the stories of people who survived it just by believing, or by having God on their side. One acquaintance told her that her church had just "prayed away" the cancer of one congregation member. As if Daun's church-- which was bringing food, providing rides to treatment 90 minutes away, and Lord know, praying-- just weren't praying enough? If wanting to live could cure cancer, then single-parent of a beloved five-year-old Daun could have bottled and sold her struggle. But in and of itself, wanting to beat a disease is not always enough necessarily, and it is a terrible betrayal of those brave people who have not survived the disease to suggest that they just didn't try hard enough. 
 
What I do mean is that getting medical assessment is important, and not the assessment of nursing home doctors, some of whom are incredibly competent and caring (my husband's aunt had one of those), some of whom are just on the take, and some of whom are just incompetent. If you wouldn't diagnose your parent's  cancer yourself, don't diagnose their type of dementia. A news story this week cites that 60% of dementias are Alzheimer's, and 20% of them are misdiagnosed. Misdiagnosis can have terrible repercussions, as I witnessed in two devastating cases with the elderly. 

My Dad has luck and genes going for and against him when it comes to dementia. At least six of his 11 siblings have died with dementia, as did his father. Monitoring medicine and staying active has helped him for now. Dad reminds me so much of his father, whom I recall as a very quiet old Grandpa, working in his basement every day, living next door to my aunt, taking long walks, and always smiling and chuckling softly when we spoke to him, the respected elder of our family. For that memory and for whatever memory Dad has today, I remain grateful.

In my next blog, I plan to share a list of some books that have informed me in helping to care for my my dad, and before that, my mother and my sister.

DEMENTIA: What Dickens Knew

The situation is as old as a Charles Dickens’ novel, as recent as the Glenn Campbell movie, I’ll Be Me, which was broadcast on TV this past month: How best to help our relatives and friends who are beginning to show signs of memory loss. Thinking back, I was fortunate to be raised by parents who both treated their own parents with respect and assistance in their old age, as did many of their siblings and their spouses, my aunts and uncles. But as La Rouchefoucauld  once said, “Each age of life is new to us: no matter how old we are, we are troubled by inexperience,” and by the time my time rolled around to assist, fifty years had passed and the world had changed for the elderly, for all of us. For one thing, there are many more of us living longer, acquiring this debilitating disorder.

*****

Charles Dickens has over 200 elderly characters among the 3500 or so which people his novels, among which is  Little Dorrit’s Mr. Nandy, my favorite for showing how very wrong-headedly some people respond to the elderly.

Mr. Nandy is an old man who has had to commit himself to the poor house, where he is both pitied and patronized by Mr. Dorrit, who is also old and in the poor house, but who somehow considers himself better than Nandy because he is not so old. In one scene, over tea with Nandy and other people, Mr. Dorrit keeps up a running commentary about the old man’s failings, right in his hearing, as though the older man were deaf, which he clearly is not. Mr. Dorrit asks if he walks much. No, says Nandy, he’s never liked walking. (“Legs going,” Dorrit whispers to the other people present.) Mr. Dorrit offers him something to eat and on Nandy’s “not instantly replying,” Dorrit whispers, “His hearing is becoming very defective. He’ll be deaf directly.”

But the most telling exchange is this one when Dorrit asks Nandy how old his younger grandchild is:

“John Edward,” said the pensioner, slowly laying down his knife and fork to consider. “How old sir? Let me think now.”

“[Dorrit]…tapped his forehead (‘Memory weak.’)”

“John Edward, sir? Well, I really forget. I couldn’t say at this minute, sir whether it’s two and two months, or whether it’s two and five months. It’s one or the other.”

“Don’t distress yourself by worrying your mind about it,” he returned, with infinite forbearance. (“Faculties evidently decaying—old man rusts in the life he leads.”)

Whew, if a grandparent’s inability to recall immediately the exact age to the month of each grandchild is the test of mental decay, most of us are in deep trouble.  

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Mr. Dorrit reminded me of the nursing home doctor I encountered when I first flew in to find my father, who had been unceremoniously dumped there the week before by a relative. Just two weeks before that, my 84-year old father had visited me in Boston, walked all of Plimoth Plantation with me, and spoken kindly to the Harvard administrators and Michigan tourists at our Thanksgiving table. Now, he was sitting in a dark nursing home at 1:00 p.m., bleary and trying to stay awake through what seemed like a drug-induced state.

“Your father is so far gone with Alzheimer’s that I don’t even know if Aricept will help, but I got him on it right away,” the doctor glared at me.

“Alzheimer’s?” I asked. “Are you sure? My grandfather had this type of dementia and it doesn’t seem like Alzheimer’s to me.”

Dad had fallen asleep, so the doctor shouted, “Russ, what did you have for lunch?” He shook Dad and repeated the question. Dad, roused himself and looked up, ginning through his memory as though through cotton bolls and replied, “I…I can’t quite recall.”

The doctor turned to me, triumphant, “You see right there: if he can’t remember what he had for lunch, that shows that he has Alzheimer’s.”

Oh honey, if not remembering what you had for lunch immediately upon waking up is the diagnosis for Alzheimer’s, then most six to sixty year olds have it. I thought there might be a more scientific way to a diagnosis. And yet, I can’t tell you how many of my friends self-diagnose their parents’ and others’ dementia as Alzheimer’s, even though they wouldn’t diagnose skin cancer without a medical opinion. There are many kinds of dementia, many stages and ways to approach it. Many doctors are as untrained and insensitive as the public on the issues.

Then the doctor said, “And if you even try to remove your father from this place, I will lock him up so tight, you will never see him.”

As the adult child who had taken the primary care for my parents for the previous 15 years, the only adult child to show up for every out-patient operation and hospitalization, whether I lived two hours away or thirteen, his words absolutely stunned me. However, my parents had never signed medically proxy papers, so my fifteen years didn’t count for anything. I was terrified.

At the urging of my great high school friend Linda Ecksmith, I made an appointment with the Cleveland Clinic Geriatric Medicine Department for an evaluation and management plan. Linda had done a lot of research and made an appointment there with Dr. F for her mother, whose condition was not related to memory loss. I mention this to show that the department is not only about issues of memory loss but the full range of health and disease for the elderly. 

If you aren’t close to the Cleveland Clinic, you can find referrals for good geriatrics referrals at Health in Aging

My father was thrilled: the Cleveland Clinic had saved his eyesight 60 years earlier when, as a welder, he had gotten a piece of steel in his eye. He revered the place. And, my Cleveland nurse friend poet Mary Chadborne told me, the Geriatric Department would medically access the situation, speak to the whole family, and help us through now and whatever stage came next.

In my next blog ("Dementia: The Cleveland Clinic and Beyond") I will briefly outline what went on in our three monthly appointments at the Geriatric Medicine Clinic, update my Dad's situation today, five years later. After that,  I will post a list of some good books (Dementia: 12 Books ) I've read over the past ten years on the subject of aging in America. I include Little Dorrit where Mr. Nandy, while a minor character, is such a character. So is my dad.

LISTENING WITH MY FEET, WALKING WITH MY EARS, DRIVING IAMBICALLY: Why David Orr Is Right

For the past 10 years, I have been walking 3-4 miles every day, most days plugged into a podcast or an audiobook. Listening with my feet, walking with my ears, I have wended my way through most of Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, through some Trollope and Austen and modern works by Nick Hornby, Toni Morrison, and others. But much as I love poetry, I have not heard much poetry on those miles, though it would be perfect for my walks through Sippo Park, past the lake, into the woods, past the library. There just aren’t many full-length audiobooks of poetry available. 

So I totally agree with David Orr’s proposal in his recent New York Times essay, “Toward an Oral Art” that we should have more audiobooks of poetry. Orr outlines problems with producing them and offers some good solutions. However, the immediate response in the letters to the editor involved why this wasn’t necessary and why his ideas wouldn’t work. 

It’s so like poets to immediately squabble about any new(ish) idea for poetry. Hell, I love Natasha Tretheway’s new poetry column in the Sunday NYT Magazine, and yet the first thing I did was write a complaint about the cartoons that accompany them. The cartoons are horrid, but Tretheway’s choices and intros are wonderful. The column has been a terrific addition to the new magazine format. To me. Several poets have complained about Tretheway’s intros. Why can't we say something nice? Why can't I?
 

Here I go: Yay David Orr. Several of my own life experiences suggest to me that Orr is onto something, and I hope against hope that an audiobook poetry series comes of it.

First is my own lifetime experience with the orality of poetry, beginning with my parents reading  to me from my Better Homes and Gardens Storybook and a tiny 1951 book titled Mother Goose: Her Best Known Rhymes. I come from a family that can (and does) recite “The Owl and the Pussycat” and all five verses of many church hymns and any number of other long poems in unison from the sheer pleasure of reciting. I like the visual component of poetry, too, but I tend toward its sound component most. Some nature, some nurture there.

Then I when I was 20, I attended my first poetry reading: William Stafford at Ohio Wesleyan College in 1971. Wow, I felt like I was experiencing poetry in a so many more dimensions than I had ever known: the poem embodied in the body of the poet that made the poem. The voice of the voice of the poem. The backstory behind what isn’t a story. I went back to my own college campus, found some funds, and hosted Stafford there two nights later during an opening he had in his schedule. 

And I have been trying to bring poets to people ever since, on campuses, in the prison program I taught in, at a national park I worked in as visiting artist. Somehow, a poetry reading by the poets themselves brings poetry to people better than anything else I have used.

For 18 years I ran a writers series at a small university in western Ohio. The audience response was nearly always enthusiastically positive, but after every poetry reading, at least one and usually many people came up to me and said, “I never thought I would enjoy that so much. I’ve never liked poetry.” No one ever said, “I never thought I would enjoy that. I never liked novels [or short stories, or essays or memoirs.]”

Never?  I would ask. Not Mother Goose rhymes or Psalms? Not Ogden Nash or Robert Frost?

“Oh well, yes, but not this modern stuff….” By which they meant, poetry that they had explicated but not recited, had analyzed but not felt, had read but not heard.

During my 18 year stint running a creative writing program, I also taught an online literature course titled “E-Poetics,” which attended to online poetry. The students’ final paper and project involved an analysis on the web presence of a contemporary poet of their choice. Interestingly enough, most of the students were adults in their 30s and 40s studying Hazardous Waste Management or Business, and this course was one they could choose from a handful of courses for their upper level English requirement. So they were not poetry-readers by any means. Many were poetry haters. They were this-was-the-only-time-slot-I have choosers. 

However, like the audiences at the readings I hosted, they usually arrived at the end astonished at how much they loved the poet they had chosen and immersed themselves in. They loved how the internet enabled them to hear and even see the poet and to get extras not as available in the books. One student read Milosz with her Polish grandmother, who broke into tears at hearing the Nobel Laureate read in her native language about the post WWII years that she had lived through. The student brought her grandmother “to class” (at the time, a chat room), and the students asked her questions about the poetry and its effect on her. One man felt that Alice Walker was remiss at not having any readings of her poetry at her website, and he created his own excellent audio podcast of his favorite poems to share with the class.

I believe if these people had an Audible account, they’d be willing to buy an audiobook of poetry of the type Orr suggests. I also believe that they would not go out looking for free poems on the web. It involves a lot of looking, often to get one poem that’s over in three minutes and not hours of ear food that can nourish a driver on the journey and through traffic jams.

One claim made in the letters to the NYT editor was that it isn’t necessary to produce audiobooks of poems because there is already so much audio on the web! Penn Sound (out of Pennsylvania University) sent in letters to claim themselves the center of the universe for this kind of thing-- and ours is free, they said! It's true, and it's wonderful, and you can check it out here if you haven't already.

It’s true and it’s wonderful, but honestly, Penn Sound is also one of many poetry ghettos, sites where poets go to hear poetry. It’s not the kind of place where you can download a book of poetry, as Orr is suggesting. Many of the recordings are brief MP3 podcasts that take downloading one by one or a reading but not the presentation of a book that has been carefully chosen for its arrangement and pacing. The catalogue takes a lot of wading through if you are new to listening to poetry. My former students are not ever going to find it on their own.

That said, many Penn recordings are wonderfully live, providing one of many models for a poetry audiobook. That is, some include the poet at readings, speaking about themselves and their poems and even interacting with the audience, a part of what so thrilled me about my first live reading by Stafford. Such poet patter and audience interaction is an element that Orr proposes might be included in these audiobooks. Unfortunately, he also proposes “critical glosses,” on which I am going to vote a no, but heck, if some poet or the producer wants to try that, then try that too, along with adding intros, trained actors, whatever. 

Audiobooks of novels sometimes include music or a reading of the novelist’s bio or notes, or other "extras," and so far, none of that has ruined the audiobook. For example, the audio of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, read by Fey herself, includes an audioclip of a SNL skit that was not in the print book. Pure lagniappe for someone like me who has never been able to stay up late enough to see SNL.  

Finally, for three decades in Cleveland, a poetry program first conceived by poet Lolette Kuby produced hour long live performances of contemporary poetry that involved actors, musicians, visual artists, or dancers in presenting the poems. At first some poets railed against actors reading their poems. Cy Dostal for one was anxious about the notion. He thought his rendering could be the only authentic one, and like several poets, he feared the actors would…overdramatize. And then, lo and behold, most poets liked the new readings that the actors brought to their work, along with the associated dances or paintings.  (Cy? Loved it.)

And  professional audiobook readers can do the same for poetry audiobooks. Not that it’s either or. Toni Morrison is  my very favorite audiobook reader of her own novels, but the stable of authors who read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society do a wonderful job of dramatizing that epistolary novel. Meanwhile over at Librivox, there are volunteers who read so well that I download their voices even when I am not particularly interested in the works they read. Mil Nicholson. If that woman ever just reads a cookbook aloud, I will listen.

So I am saying, let the poets read their own work but let actors read the work, too, and hey, let's try poets reading other poets' work. Try it all. Load it on the audio with an intro or patter or neither, with just a bit of music or without. And not just for my walks. There are the car trips across country or an hour down the road to Cleveland, too. Please. I’m all ears.