THE MEASURE OF OUR AGE

A book about growing old and the indignities—many of them avoidable—that aging entails.

Connolly, former head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative, opens with the observation that in the 20th century, Americans added 30 years to their average life spans. Technology has helped, with family connections maintained by Zoom calls, uncooperative hips and knees easily replaced, and so forth, so that “for millions of people, there has never been a better time to be old.” People in their 70s report being happier than ever in the lives. Then come the 80s, when, as Connolly observes, some three-quarters of people suffer some “functional disability” that drastically reduces quality of life. Many of the attendant phenomena are structural and can be changed. However, most elder care is provided by unpaid family members, such as spouses and adult children, at an estimated annual loss of $522 billion in potential income. Those caregivers are often untrained, while facilities sometimes prey on patients. Regarding the latter, Connolly urges stronger policing and punishment, and she argues against the common practice of assigning full guardianship to non–family members. As she writes, many of the societal woes that the elderly face are intersectional: Women face both ageism and sexism, while older minority members face racism and economic discrimination—to say nothing of worse institutional care generally, as the demographics of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes attest. Throughout this lucid and thought-provoking treatise, Connolly offers thoughts on ways of improving life for the elderly, ranging from living in mixed-age communities rather than seniors-only retirement enclaves to applying psychotropic drugs to the treatment of anxiety and depression in hopes of finding “ways that mind-altering substances might alter the course of mind-altering diseases.”

A book that deserves wide attention and discussion among aging readers and those who care for them.