"Human wreckage" or "functional elder"? Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs) says she's both in Growing Old, a lively examination of the aging process.
With "the average age worldwide" hovering around 30, old age has become perhaps the last conversational taboo and the least illuminated stage of existence. When Thomas introduces herself as "a widowed great-grandmother" who's approaching 90, she knows her readers may feel "a little flash of aversion." She understands. She, too, once saw aging as "a rare condition I didn't need to think about." Now she sees it as a form of "space travel."
In a conversational, anecdotal style, Thomas looks at hearing loss as a precursor to brain damage and transforms the use of hearing aids from a stigma into a miracle. She enumerates her "daily reminders of failure" and how these losses "brighten when I'm working." She tours senior living communities as a way to fend off the mortal danger of isolation, urging that these places should be researched long before they're needed. And she doesn't shrink from discussing death as "the conclusion of old age," and advocating the use of death doulas, whose clients have been "eased into space and died softly."
Whether she's explaining cannibalism as a "sacred practice" that allows people to keep the dead inside themselves, or the modern practice of liquefaction, which results in remains "going down to a sewer with everything else," Thomas's lively curiosity is contagious, capable of turning frequently avoided topics into matters of essential discussion. --Janet Brown, author and former bookseller