seniors Archives - Page 6 of 23 - Fran Moreland Johns

California/geriatrics/Lifestyle/Money/seniors

September 3, 2014

Smarter Scams, New Victims Every Day

My “grandson” and I talked for a full several minutes before I determined he was no one I knew. Despite a few clues – my grandchildren don’t call me “Grandma,” his voice could have been the 21-year-old I hadn’t seen in nearly a year, but it wasn’t perfect – I found the caller convincing enough to trade three or four questions and answers before I hung up the phone.

“Grandson” never got around to the pitch. I want to believe I would never have fallen for a story that would separate me from several thousand dollars, but I surely could have. Today’s scammers – especially those preying on seniors or the socially isolated – are incredibly skilled.

One very smart senior in the San Francisco Bay Area was recently taken in by a call from a fake grandson – and had the courage to tell the story to the local newspaper. Retired physician/author Walter Bortz, who has a real and well-loved grandson, listened with shock and sorrow to an entirely plausible tale that wound up costing him $5,000. The “grandson” told of having had too much drink the night before, of drugs found in the cab he unfortunately took, going to jail, getting beaten up and having his nose broken. Then he gave the phone to a “police officer” who explained how bail could be arranged……..

Elements of the scam – eloquently told to local reporters by the victim – are widely used. The “relative” is often caught up in an arrest involving drugs and/or guns (through no fault of his or her own) and often in another state or country. The need is always urgent, to avoid some terrible consequence like jail time or to cover medical expenses. Transactions are made through prepaid cards available almost everywhere today. Once cashed, the money is impossible to trace.

It’s the meanness of these scams that is almost as bad as the financial loss. Rose, a young businesswoman, tells of her own grandmother getting a call from someone pretending to be Rose and spilling out a tale of disaster that had her grandmother frightened and sobbing. Long after the ruse was uncovered and explained – “I was calling my grandmother, saying, ‘Look! I’m here at my desk. I’m sending you a photo! ’” – the targeted victim was still in distress over the fears she had had for her beloved granddaughter.

JoAnn (a pseudonym,) a friend of this writer in Louisiana, fell victim – almost – to one of the oldest scams around. It began with an official-looking notice of her having won a Canadian lottery. JoAnn lives alone and has withdrawn from friends – but she plays the lottery; she thought one of her tickets had paid off. The notification included a “Certified check” for her seven-figure winnings. All she had to do was deposit the check, wire $1,279 to cover out-of-state taxes, and live in luxury. JoAnn was saved by an alert teller who had not seen her come into the local bank for a long time. The teller began asking questions about the sender, and JoAnn finally told her about winning the lottery. “If you don’t mind,” the teller said, “let me see if this check clears before you do anything further.”

My friend suffered not from financial loss but from the embarrassment factor. JoAnn was in tears by the time she got through telling the story over the phone. “How foolish did I look?” she said. “Suppose word gets around that I fell for such a thing. I have a PhD, for heaven’s sake.” The teller turned everything over to federal agents and it’s highly unlikely that word got around.

But word should get around. Bortz deserves high praise for going public, proving that no one is exempt from the possibility of being scammed. “I like to think that I am worldly wise,” he told The Almanac, “(and yet) I got snookered into this one. But I guess it shows that I’m a nice grandfather.”

Nice grandfathers, and grandmothers, and gentle people everywhere, are being targeted today. The Federal Trade Commission has a fairly complete list of current scams, and how to deal with them, on its Consumer Information page.

The schemes are old, the twists are new, the advice is age-old and two-fold: (a) Keep asking questions; and (b) If it seems too good (or even bad) to be true, it probably is.

California/caregiving/End-of-Life/Health/seniors

June 8, 2014October 7, 2021

The Intriguing Invisible Audience

by Fran Johns

The questions were sharp, incisive. The comments were poignant, sometimes wrenching, sometimes funny. But the really funny thing was that I couldn’t see a soul in the audience.

This was a recent talk and group discussion with the Senior Center Without Walls. I was on the phone in my living room, the moderator was somewhere else, and some 20 to 30 seniors – most of them old, if unseen, friends by now – were sitting comfortably in their San Francisco Bay Area living rooms. Who knew?

This particular discussion dealt with end-of-life issues, although I got in (with advance permission) an introductory plug for Perilous Times: An inside look at abortion before – and after – Roe v Wade, and my current soapbox about preserving reproductive justice. I talked briefly about my longtime involvement with Compassion and Choices, about the work of that excellent organization, and the multiple benefits of considering one’s own mortality before one’s own death is knocking at the door. From the various phones came personal tales – “My husband died exactly as he wished…” “one member of the family wanted to contradict what (the dying person) explicitly wanted…” And questions about what C&C can do (counsel, advocate, support) and even – every nonprofit representative’s favorite: “Where can I send money?”

Audience members come and go at will, during Senior Center Without Walls discussions, and the pretty constant beeping that heralded the comings and goings made the entire event feel like a free-wheeling open house. Which is, in fact, not far from the truth.

Senior Center Without Walls participants play bingo, read plays, join support groups for everything from low vision to LGBT issues, bird-watch (guided help with identifying the birds seen from your window) and share in adventures that range from armchair travel to sing-alongs.

I hope they learned a little from this discussion leader; I learned a LOT from the scattered seniors of Seniors Without Walls.

California/General interest/Health/Medicine/seniors

May 12, 2014

Good genetic news for geezers

by Fran Johns

The Three Fates, Flemish tapestry (probably Brussels ca 1510-1520) Victoria and Albert Musem, London. (WikiMedia)

Live longer, get smarter? We wish.

And this wish could some day come true, thanks to the gene variant KL-VS, whose friendlier name is the klotho gene. The klotho gene was already known to be associated with longer life. But a team of scientists at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes, found that it also seems to make people smarter.

One in five of us has the klotho gene. As this writer is definitely older I had hoped to get in on the smarter, although I never cancelled the dementia provision of my advance directives. But in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle health writer Erin Allday Dr. Lennart Mucke, director of neurological research at Gladstone, said, “Klotho increases cognition but doesn’t replace aging-related decline. You’re just coming down from a higher level.” So much for immediate — or personal — optimism.

UCSF Assistant Professor of Neurology Dena Dubal was lead author of the study, findings of which were published recently in the journal Cell Reports. Dubal and Mucke say more studies are needed, but the hope is that eventually klotho could help old brains — old human brains; so far we’re talking about mouse brains — function better.

This writer, having an old brain far too right-brained to follow neurological research very far, did at least complete several years of Greek at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College some years before Dena Dubal was born. But as my class notes are not handy I turned to Theoi.com, an online encyclopedia of Greek mythology, to find more about Klotho. (For the record, her name is more commonly spelled Clotho in classical texts, but most of all this pre-dates Spellcheck.)

Klotho and her sisters Lakhesis and Atropos where the daughters of Zeus and Themis, and in Greek mythology one couldn’t ask for better parentage. They were known as “The Fates,” or “The Moirai,” the goddesses who determined everyone’s destiny. According to Theoi, “They assigned to every person his or her fate or share in the scheme of things.” Clotho (on the right in the tapestry above) was “the Spinner,” who spun the thread of life. Lakhesis (in the center) measured the thread of life and Atropos (on the left) cut the thread. Presumably they are arising from Themis; birthing in mythology was somewhat less complicated than today.

(It’s tempting to speculate on what it would mean to have too many Atropos gene variants, but that is going too far with all this.)

No amount of Googling turns up the scientist who named the KL-VS gene variant after Klotho, but he or she had an appropriate understanding of Greek mythology. If Klotho can indeed eventually lead to reactivating old brains, she will have spun us all a golden thread.

Family and Friends/Lifestyle/seniors/Women

March 28, 2014

Random Acts of Kindness

by Fran Johns

This article first appeared on Huffington Post

One particularly gray day, the kind of day writers have when their brains fog over and their vocabularies vanish, I had an email from the irrepressible Anne Lamott. Lamott is a longtime friend whose writing and gumptious spirit I greatly admire — but not someone from whom I would have sought literary endorsement in a million years.

“I can’t wait to blurb your book,” she wrote. Clouds vanished, vocabulary returned, book was soon published with a classic Lamott remark on the back cover proclaiming Perilous Times “rich in (the author’s) trademark blend of stories, history, knowledge and passion… an important contribution to (the fight for reproductive rights.)” Unsolicited kindness from a casual friend: an incalculable gift.

The kindness of strangers, though, is priceless. And might surely be a movement whose time has come.

Susan Johnson Nelson is up for starting the movement. She is also anxious to change the image of America and Americans from the ugly to the kind, as is her husband Andy. A few years ago the Nelsons traded in a comfortable life in San Francisco, where he was well established in a career in law, to join the U.S. Foreign Service. Having just completed a two-year tour in Managua, Nicaragua, he is now in an immersion program in Washington preparing for their next assignment in Hanoi. The Nelson family — which now includes 3-year-old Bode and 1-year-old Lake — is one you would want to represent the U.S. abroad. (The Nelson boys already enjoy love and adoration from fans on several continents.)

Susan Nelson decided recently to celebrate the Christian season of Lent not with the traditional giving up of one thing or another but with a daily act of kindness. Jesus would probably be fine with this. The inspiration actually came, she wrote in an initial social media post, from being on the receiving end of a double act of kindness herself not long ago. While negotiating the streets of downtown Washington with two screaming toddlers who had just received immunization shots, she ducked into a sandwich shop on a cookie diversion mission. A long queue of tired, hungry people let her jump to the front of the line (kindness #1), where the lady behind the counter smilingly offered not one cookie but two (double kindness #2.) Nelson’s first random act of kindness: a bouquet of flowers delivered to the lady behind the sandwich shop counter.

Others follow daily. They have included homemade cupcakes for Pete at the front desk, a basket of flowers painting by Bode for a post-surgery teacher, pick-up and delivery of recycling left in hallways (double kindness: gift to building residents and anger aversion for the maintenance workers who would otherwise have to deal with it.) There was babysitting for a friend in need, banana bread baked and delivered to the local firehouse. There was Andy’s kindness to Mother Earth, buying toothbrushes from all-recycled materials (hey, credit where credit is due; Andy also does extraordinary acts of fatherly kindness when Mom is wearing down) and on one dark and snowy Saturday morning both boys slept in until 9 a.m. — duly reported in the online exchange as a great kindness on their part.

The digital saga has also prompted reports of other acts of kindness elsewhere, such as the story of a woman with cancer, having her head shaved in a beauty salon as chemo-induced hair loss began and then finding her bill had been paid by an earlier customer.

They may be small acts of kindness, but who knows how large their effects? For many of us, frustrated with what seems the impossibility of world peace, tiny moments of joy bring renewed hope. It’s a start.

Abortion/compassion and choices/courts/Death and Dying/End-of-Life/Health/Healthcare/Reproductive rights/seniors/Women

March 20, 2014October 7, 2021

Laboratories of the States: The good… and then, the very bad and ugly

by Fran Johns

This essay first appeared on Huffington Post

Will a few states rule the United States? Or fundamentally change it? And if so, who are the winners and losers? Depending on your point of view, this “laboratory-of-the-states” business is good news today… or not.

The metaphor dates to the dissenting opinion of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in a 1932 case, New State Ice Company v. Liebmann and is often used today to assert the success of one social program or another. The best most recent — and decidedly successful — laboratory-of-the-state demonstration is Oregon’s Death with Dignity law. This writer’s extraordinary attorney friend Kathryn Tucker published a paper in the 2008 Michigan Law Review, when she was Director of Legal Affairs for Compassion & Choices, titled “In the Laboratory of the States.” Tucker wrote, “Because Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act has proven both useful and harmless, this Article concludes that it is time for other states to follow Oregon’s lead and enact their own legislation to allow their citizens an alternative to what otherwise could be a prolonged and painful death from terminal illness.”

Tucker deserves much of the credit for expanding the Oregon law into the movement that now seems a clear national trend, along with Compassion & Choices (full disclosure: this writer has long been a C&C supporter, volunteer and local board member). Washington and Vermont have passed similar bills and Montana wisely concluded that it’s none of the state’s business what a doctor and patient decide to do, making physician aid in dying now legal in those states. A handful of other states have pending bills and still others are mounting strong movements. So Oregon’s laboratory of success is likely to be the nation’s overall policy in the foreseeable future, and we’re all better off for that. (Opposition has come from religious and political forces that hold onto a belief that God requires some sort of existential suffering be visited upon Her dying creatures.)

The laboratory-of-the-states pathway is both effective and well trodden, said San Jose State Professor/author Larry Gerston at a recent Commonwealth Club political panel event. The panel was looking at other current trends, but Gerston specifically cited the Oregon Death with Dignity model as an example of how it all works.

Now — what if Texas becomes a laboratory for the denial of reproductive rights?

In Texas, just for a rough overview, recent laws have passed requiring parental notification and now parental consent; requiring abortions to be performed in ambulatory surgical centers with hospital-grade operating rooms; requiring women who seek abortions to submit to ultrasounds and then wait 24 hours for the procedure. The list of harsh, medically unnecessary restrictions and requirements is long, and a clear violation of both ‘best medical practice’ and women’s rights.

It is worth noting who are the winners and losers in these state laboratories. In Oregon, the winners are we the people everywhere. Few of us would turn down the right to a humane and compassionate death, which is made a possible choice by death-with-dignity laws. Losers? No one. No one is compelled to choose a hastened death, anywhere, any time.

In Texas, however, the scorecard is seriously skewed. The winners are archconservatives that have learned that this is a good way to get votes. Winners also include those, men and women alike, whose religion teaches that life begins at conception and thus all abortion is wrong. This writer can appreciate those who hold such views, but it is not possible to uphold the rights of a fetus without denying the right of the woman in whose body it resides. Many of us come down on the side of already-alive women and on the doctrine of church/state separation.

And the losers in Texas: women. All women. Primarily they are women without money or resources, who are frequently disadvantaged and disproportionately women of color. These women are already turning to desperate measures to end unwanted pregnancies; increasingly they are turning up in emergency rooms with failed attempts to self-abort. To a lesser degree, but still worth considering, the losers include those — men, women, boys, girls — who need the other services provided by rapidly closing clinics: birth control, sex education, STD testing, breast cancer screening and many other critically important needs that will now go unmet.

It’s hard to contemplate the win-lose picture of this Texas laboratory. But if it indeed becomes a laboratory-of-the-states argument in upcoming Supreme Court cases, and elsewhere, the losers will be all of us. You and me. We the people.

Literature/seniors/Women

March 14, 2014

Literature, longevity & Mavis Gallant

by Fran Johns

This essay first appeared on Huffington Post

I’m in mourning for Mavis Gallant.

You don’t remember Mavis Gallant? If you’re older than 14, you shared a century with her characters. You would have passed them on the streets of Manhattan, or Montreal, or Paris. They were people you recognized… even if you might not have stopped to talk with them. Where you really got to know them was in the pages of The New Yorker, which published 116 of her stories over a span of 40 years.

Mavis Gallant died recently at the entirely respectable age of 91. She produced sharp, beautifully crafted and highly readable short stories for more than half of those years. Collections of her stories were published in 1956 (The Other Paris), 2009 (The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories), and a dozen more collections appeared in the years in between — it boggles the short story writer’s mind.

And here’s the rub for me: In addition to the mourning, there is envy, admiration and — to be honest — a dash of literary despair. On the one hand is the shimmering example of a writer — a woman writer at that! — still writing great stories well past the age of, ahem, this octogenarian writer. And on the other is the sheer heft of her oeuvre. One volume of collected stories alone ran to 900 pages. We are not talking pages of tripe.

Mavis Gallant understood the abandoned and deceived; her own mother deposited her at a boarding school when she was four, saying, “I’ll be back in 10 minutes.” She also understood the displaced, having left her Canadian home for France, briefly wandering elsewhere in the post-World War II years when displacement was a fact of life for much of Europe and Asia. As a woman who defined the phrase “living by one’s wits,” she turned those wits to short fiction in a singular way. She also wrote novels and essays, critically acclaimed nonfiction.

But here is another rub: On top of the lack of maternal love and affection, Gallant endured other unimaginable emotional assaults and upheavals, realities that underlie her fiction. As a girl of 10, she was lied to about her father — she waited two years for him to reappear because nobody told her he had died. She was briefly and unhappily married, and heart-breakingly betrayed by her literary agent, who pocketed the money from the first New Yorker stories while Gallant struggled with hunger and despair in Spain and France. Gallant took it all in, survived and turned her life to short fiction, to the benefit of us all.

The rubs boil down to this: Suppose you’re a writer with a plain old happy childhood? You’ve already watched with envy — sometimes admiration and way more than a dash of despair — the flood of memoirs documenting addiction, abuse and aberrations of every conceivable kind, most of which inhabit bestseller lists for months. And here are the obituaries for one hugely admired short story writer, with the news that she too has a personal depth of Shakespearean tragedy to mine. Bless her battered heart.

At least she shared it all with us, in those dozens and dozens of marvelous stories. And kept at it until the end of her 91 eventful years.

Rest in peace, Mavis.

Abortion/California/compassion and choices/Death and Dying/Dying Unafraid/End-of-Life/General interest/Health/Law/Politics & Causes/Reproductive rights/seniors/Women

February 17, 2014October 7, 2021

End-of-life compassion slowly winning

by Fran Johns

If you think you might die some day, and you’d like to do it with as much dignity and as little pain as possible, things are looking up. Which is encouraging to me, a believer in end-of-life and reproductive rights both — and progress in one out of two causes is something to cheer about.

credit acpinternist.org — Credit acpinternist.org

The outlook for a compassionate end to this life in the U.S. continues to brighten. In a recent New York Times article summing up advances that are being made in multiple states,reporter Erik Eckholm quotes my good friend Barbara Coombs Lee, President of Compassion and Choices: “There is a quiet, constant demand all over the country for a right to die on one’s own terms, and that demand is likely to grow as the baby boomers age.”

Lee, a baby boomer herself, is in a position to know. She has been at the forefront of the death with dignity movement since it was in its infancy. We first met when I was researching Dying Unafraid (Synergistic Press, 1999) and she was head of Compassion In Dying, headquartered in Seattle. That group had formed, I learned during a weekend spent with leaders and volunteers in the late 1990s, “because we got tired of reading headlines about people with AIDS jumping off of highway overpasses. And we thought there had to be a better way to die.” Compassion In Dying later merged with End-of-Life Choices, which had itself grown out of the somewhat more in-your-face Hemlock Society, to become Compassion and Choices. (And I am proud to have been a part of C&C since its inception as a volunteer, former local board chair, current leadership council member and general cheerleader.)

In those early days, all was not optimism. While Oregon was proving that a physician-aid-in-dying law could work, efforts elsewhere were failing with heartbreaking irregularity. The one most painful to me culminated in the defeat, in 2006, of a bill which would have legalized compassionate dying — in other words, with the aid of one’s physician if one so chose — in California. Assembly members Patty Berg and Lloyd Levine introduced the legislation, and polls showed overwhelming support among Californians, including a majority of California physicians. Victory seemed all but certain, despite a vigorous and expensive campaign against the bill by the Catholic Church (not most Catholics, just Catholic officialdom) and the California Medical Association (of which a small percentage of CA doctors are members.) At the judiciary committee hearing chaired by then CA Senator Joe Dunn — who had loudly proclaimed his support — Dunn suddenly had a change of heart. Something about a conversation with his priest, he said in a rambling commentary. Dunn then cast the deciding vote against the bill and it died an unnatural death in committee. A few weeks later Dunn was termed out of the California legislature and took a job — surprise, surprise — as CEO of the California Medical Association. It was not my personal most encouraging experience with the democratic process.

Now, however, sanity is prevailing. The option of choosing a compassionate death is legal in Washington, Vermont, Montana and New Mexico and the cause is gaining in other states. As Steve Heilig, another highly esteemed friend who is co-editor of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, points out in a current letter to the New York Times, “Progress is possible if carefully and ethically pursued.”

If only there could be a careful, ethical pursuit of progress — instead of the ongoing, reckless, politically and religiously-driven backward march we’re seeing — for reproductive rights.

Education/End-of-Life/Family and Friends/friendships/General interest/journalism/Lifestyle/Literature/Media/seniors/sisters/Women

February 3, 2014November 16, 2021

You CAN go home again…

by Fran Johns

… but it won’t be quite the same.

I’m just home from a trip to Washington, DC

commons.wikimedia.org

for a nice event at The Corcoran Gallery that included a wide-ranging assortment of events — business, pleasure and in between. There were old faces, new faces and vastly altered landscapes, familiar turf and unfamiliar weather.

There were serendipitous treats like catching up with old friends I’ve not seen in a few years or a few decades… in the case of old friend Roger Mudd, it was a matter of catching up on some 60 years.

And a side trip to my childhood hometown of Ashland, VA, where the characters of many of my short stories roam.

Thomas Wolfe, whose book title inspired this blog post, put it this way: “Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.” I wasn’t inspired to lean down my ear on the frosty February earth of Ashland (although the phrase brings fond memories of leaning our childhood ears upon the train tracks to figure out whether a locomotive was en route,) but it was fascinating to find things changed, and unchanged:

The dining room where I ate dinners for some 20+ years features a different wallpaper and is decorated with different art, but it’s still a warm and welcoming room and I was incredibly blessed to be invited to a “Homecoming Dinner” therein with family, old friends and the now residents of the home.

Randolph-Macon College is unchanged in some of its gracious, over 100-year-old buildings and long familiar original campus on which I grew up, but surely changed in the rapidly expanding new campus… and the student body which was all male in my long ago childhood. It was a very special treat to meet with some of the current students and faculty, in class and at lunch. That story follows in a few days here; I hope you’ll stay tuned.

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