By Peggy Sturdivant

It was timely in many ways to meet Susan Towle for coffee early in the day that would deposit me at Boston’s Logan airport by the following morning. She just completed four years of work on a book that will make its formal debut at Secret Garden Books on Friday, June 12th 6 p.m. Its subtitle is “A Guidebook for the Journey Through Old.

Writing “Old Is Not a Four Letter Word” has been her working journey the last five years. After 40 years in nursing, the last 20 of which were in eldercare, Towle retired with at least a book’s worth of information to share. She has witnessed the typical American’s approach to aging, of ourselves or of our parents, and she knows we are unprepared.

My geographic journey would begin that night and take me to my twin nieces’ high school graduation from my own alma mater. I’d be with my family and yes, my aging parents. I’d see my father in his cervical collar that he’s worn since January when he fractured two vertebrae in his neck. I’d plunge into the logistics of walker versus wheelchair for him and oxygen-ready wheelchair for paternal grandmother. Reading Towle’s book on the overnight flight seemed a perfect plan.

Not that anyone in my family is known for their planning. Towle begins the book with the necessity of a plan for aging, stating, “Denial of our natural aging makes for a very rough journey for a great number of us.” To further establish the parallels between a geographic journey and that of aging she writes, “Suppose one made no plans whatsoever before embarking on a trip.”

Busted. She had nailed my family, and I was only on the Prologue, plane still at the gate. When I was a kid we routinely didn’t know until the night before if we were going to get in the car and drive to Florida for February vacation. Once we decided to go south we’d leave the next morning. Late that night my father would pull up near the Vacancy sign of a roadside motel. My sister and I would lift our sleepy heads hoping that he would give us a thumb’s up sign, meaning the price was right, and beds were imminent.

My family survived those impulsive trips to Fort Lauderdale but we also knew the endpoint was welcoming friends. Is that why we were able to plunge without forethought? Perhaps so much denial about getting older has to do with avoiding the destination? This doesn’t work.

In person, Towle told me that she wrote the book because as a culture we’re highly unprepared for our aging. Most people want to age at home and don’t realize that “Medicare will not pay for that. We’re on our own.” Her guidebook is written for adult children and the elders themselves. She believes that by age 65 everyone should accept that they are lucky enough to have lived to be considered “old.” Which is why she thinks we’ve got stop treating the word old itself as negative. “We have a whole ‘nother lifetime after 60; let’s make it a good life.”

To share what she has learned and to help move others beyond denial, Towle structured the book into 12 chapters, each with a monthly goal, so that an individual or family can be prepared after a year to embrace the next chapter of life.

If planning could have prevented some of what has happened over the last four year how I would love a do-over. Perhaps my father wouldn’t have had that stroke, and he certainly wouldn’t have had that fall reaching for the light switch with what’s now his “good hand.”

Both as individuals and as a culture we make plenty of mistakes. We make them when we choose denial over confronting the fact that someone shouldn’t still be driving, when we don’t talk to our parents about how they want to die, and when we don’t talk to our children about how we want to live.

Denial appears to work until the phone call, but preparation might have prevented that phone call. And in my family and thousands of others there is a return to denial after the first crisis. Towle has seen how families suffer because siblings and parents couldn’t have a discussion, couldn’t be on the same page. She chose where to relocate, near both her son and daughter and their families in Ballard. And as she retired from active nursing and eldercare management Towle couldn’t stop trying to help others, hence the book she had to write. She is already following her own advice for planning the journey; she will be 75 on her next birthday.

As for me? The overnight from Seattle to Boston was smooth but I didn’t sleep a wink. I wish I could say I’d used the time to make a plan but I’m going to take it one chapter at a time.

http://www.journeythroughold.com/