Now, no friend or colleague discussing her aging parents within 30 feet of me is safe from my slightly nosy — O.K., highly nosy — questions, because I’m always looking for personal stories that illustrate larger issues. People have been generous about sharing their experiences. They know how stressed family caregivers can feel, how invisible or diminished older adults can be made to feel, yet how creative and rewarding these later years can also be. They want The Times to discuss those issues. A recent favorite idea, about caregivers’ isolation, came from a reader, Marcy Sherman-Lewis of St. Joseph, Mo. When she messaged me via Facebook, she was stewing: The owner of a hair salon she’d patronized for years had asked her to stop bringing her husband along. He has dementia, so Ms. Sherman-Lewis can no longer leave him at home alone. “What am I supposed to do, keep him in a crate in the car?” she said when I called. Almost 400 commenters offered sympathy and counsel, expressing their own frustrations and fears. And readers sometimes turn to us when other efforts to bring change fall short. My editors and I take some satisfaction in a series of stories about a retirement facility in Norfolk, Va., which began barring residents in its assisted living and nursing units from its swanky waterfront dining room. Only independent living residents could eat there, management decreed. The residents’ families had held meetings, consulted the county ombudsman and hired a lawyer, to no avail. When The New Old Age (and the Norfolk paper) began to pay attention, not only did management back down, but the Department of Justice also investigated and found violations of the Federal Fair Housing Act. A consent order mandating nondiscriminatory policies followed, along with fines and compensation for those harmed, putting the whole industry on notice. The most recent New Old Age column, an admittedly wonky one, looks at a problem almost nobody thinks or knows much about — until an elder lands in the hospital and learns that Medicare won’t cover rehab costs afterward. Why? Because the patient was classified as under “observation,” and wasn’t actually admitted to the hospital as an inpatient.
In 2009 , when I took over as primary writer of a New York Times column called The New Old Age , I thought I could probably keep it going for ten years or so . Then , I would run out of things to say about aging and caregiving .