A winning title, HOW TO DRESS FOR OLD AGE follows through as a triumphant text exploring and navigating the emotional terrain of adult children caring for their ageing parents.
The emotional and intellectual labour of late life care for an absent father and a stoic mother is chronicled by colleagues Peta Murray and David Carlin in a book that is heartfelt, honest and full of humanity.
In turns funny and confronting, David and Peta write about their respective parents, Joan and Frank, and by doing so contemplate their own prospects into old age.
Frank is rattling round widowerhood, somewhere near Retirementville, on the outskirts of depression, when he relinquishes to the wishes of his children to enter an aged care facility. Self involved, shy and socially awkward, frank becomes somewhat of a hermit in his new home. “A stubborn attachment to the glum kept him isolated and morose unable to participate in anything that might have enhanced his well being.”
Joan is a lot more outgoing, stoic in her changed circumstances, giving some salve to the guilt that David suffers from the necessity of placing his mother in care.
As the book concedes, residential care runs on fantasies -all of the things your aged loved ones are about to start doing together. HOW TO DRESS FOR OLD AGE addresses these myths and unpacks them, exploring past trauma and present terror, with a clear and present reality.
The book tackles the shame some folks feel of being reduced to this – the inmate and the family member and the sorrow experienced in the oft cited scenario- not so much vanished as faded away.
HOW TO DRESS FOR OLD AGE torpedoes the tropes of old age, consolidating the adage that age should not whither nor custom stale an infinite variety. It is a seed bed for elder flowering, of regeneration, and of intergenerational interdependence.
A marvellous tag team tasking of writers, a symbiotic response to the inevitable reversal of roles, of children taking responsibility for parents, HOW TO DRESS FOR OLD AGE has a sartorial eloquence. Read it before you get a day older.
HOW TO DRESS FOR OLD AGE by David Carlin & Peta Murray is published by Upswell Publishing.
