Aging – Corpus

Encounters with Musical Centenarians

10 June 2025 2 Comments

William Green

Nearly everyone wants to know the ‘secret’ to longevity. Several years ago, on his 107th birthday, Jack Coe (at that time the oldest man in New Zealand) declared that the secret was ‘popcorn and beer’. Hastings centenarian Vi Cassin, born in 1924, gave her answer as ‘onions and beer’. I would like to meet her, not only to find out whether she consumes these two items separately or together, but also because she is a pianist. As a pianist myself, I regularly work with retirement village choirs and have become increasingly intrigued by centenarian musicians. Is part of the ‘secret’ to longevity contained in their musicianship?

Studies have shown that music stimulates parts of the brain responsible for memory, attention and problem-solving skills. I’ve certainly noticed that many musical centenarians I’ve met continue to be proficient in using Google, email and YouTube. Another important factor also seems to be that being musically active contributes to a sense of purpose, accomplishment and community belonging. [Read more…] about Encounters with Musical Centenarians

The Suitcases (Part Two)

7 December 2020 7 Comments

Lynn Jenner

This is Part Two of “The Suitcases.” Part One can be read here.

My mother’s name was Lesley Jenner. She brought me up to call her Lesley, because she said she was a person, not just a mother. From her late eighties Lesley had dementia. Not long before Lesley died, she drew a map and gave it to a caregiver. Lesley had put the words ‘Rest Home’ on the map, and somewhere above that and to the right, sitting all by itself in the sky, like Jerusalem on a mediaeval map, was the house where she grew up, neatly labelled ‘6 Highcliff Road.’ There was a loop to indicate the Ross’s Corner tram terminus and two sentences written in pencil. One said, ‘Can you help me find my mother?’ and the other said ‘My parents are not well off.’ The fact that Lesley had organised a pencil and paper, written this plea for help and given it to a staff member spoke of her desperation. The accuracy of the map was proof of the islands of memory and logic Lesley still had inside her.

When I visited her in the rest home, Lesley never wanted me to leave. She never said, “Don’t go.” She would just look at me like an animal in a trap, and I knew what she meant. When her tea-time approached, or when the sun was setting, or when I just couldn’t stand being there any longer, I would tell her I had to pick up my partner from the train and Lesley would nod, because a man needing his dinner trumps everything in the lives of women. Lesley would watch me as I walked out. In the car I would sanitise my hands and look at the sun setting over the sea. I would try to breathe normally, and I would drive to the railway station where I would sit in the car until my partner’s train arrived. Sometimes that was an hour.

The Suitcases

9 November 2020 6 Comments

Lynn Jenner

My mother’s name was Lesley Jenner. She brought me up to call her Lesley, because she said she was a person, not just a mother. Lesley was brought up in Dunedin in a Jewish family and was a quiet and polite person who never asked for much. She had green fingers and loved to be outside in nature. Her habit of mind was scientific. Lesley died in the autumn of 2019, a week before Pesach. Immediately afterwards, and for several months, I was occupied with the administration of her death. This followed a period of several years when I had been much occupied with Lesley’s life.

In 2013, Lesley left her own home and lived with me while we waited for an apartment in a retirement village. She had told me years before that leaving her house would be terrible for her, and it was. When we picked Lesley up from the airport and drove her to our place in our tiny little car, she was solid and heavy in the front seat. Her face was set in an expression of absolute misery and she was silent, as if her closed mouth was all that was holding back an endless outpouring of tears.

Once Lesley was unpacked, I started trying to get some routines going. I remember bright spring sunlight shining into the dining room, matching my optimism that we would create a new life now, as people who cared about each other. My partner and I would share our life with my mother and that would help to make up for some of the gaps that were visible in her memory and thinking. We had shared our house with people before so we thought we could make this work. My mother and I would talk over tricky matters like money or what each person needed, and we would solve problems together. After all, I was fifty-nine now.

[Read more…] about The Suitcases

A loaded skip: moving in a pandemic

5 October 2020 3 Comments

M. L. E. Brown

In the past ten months, my husband, his sister, and I have moved my husband’s parents – first one, and then the other – into different wings of the same managed aged-care facility. We then had to sell their Northland home, built by my in-laws and only reluctantly abandoned after fifty-five years of married life. When settlement finally eventuated, we had a few frantic days to travel to Northland and clear out the house. All this has occurred during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. My husband’s job at Auckland Airport dictated strictly no close contact with either his father or his sister (as she was helping their father move into the retirement village). Auckland’s second lock-down was announced three days into the final push, my husband was recalled to work, and the whole thing ended in a terrific rush.

Having moved my own mother out of her home just before she died eighteen years ago, I know this is never an easy process for any family. Then, however, I didn’t have to wear PPE and masks, stay in motels, and refrain from hugging my parent when she was most distressed. I didn’t move my mother with any notion of not being allowed to visit her again, or aware that I’d be expressly excluded from attending her funeral. These were all realities my husband faced, and faces, with regard to both his parents in these uncertain times. Covid-19 has certainly added some unkind twists to all of our everyday situations.

They shoot horses don’t they?

7 September 2020 7 Comments

Doug Lilly

Many people think of the hospice as a place where people with cancer go to die. Back in 2014, when I frequently walked past the Otago Community Hospice building in Dunedin’s North East Valley on my way home, that was my impression. What a sad place that must be to work, I thought. Although I practically lived on its doorstep, I had only ventured into this daunting place once. My partner had asked me to drop off a gift to a friend who was a hospice inpatient. I agreed, but only to leave it at reception. I didn’t want to go any further, in case I encountered dying people.

Like most people, despite ‘bearing witness’ to thousands upon thousands of deaths (both real and imagined) through images in the news and in film and television, my exposure to the reality of death and the dying process was minimal. When I went to the funeral home to view my father’s body in 2003, I was so uncomfortable about real death that I could only manage to look at him for a matter of seconds. When my mother had a serious stroke a few years later, I spent time with her as she slowly deteriorated, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and extended family. I was not present when she died, but when asked if I wanted to see her body, I declined, remembering how traumatic I had found trying to view my father’s body years earlier.

DrawThis! Hacking a way out of isolation

11 May 2020 1 Comment

Liz Breslin

What do you do, with these limitations given to you?

It’s a question we’ve been variously asking ourselves these past weeks. There is no right answer. Not King Lear, not sourdough. But isn’t it interesting to notice where we go?

I went to a hackathon in week two of Level Four, I think it was, but pick a number, in these numbered times. I went because something I read said community and connection and because I was missing that and because I was scared to, so I did. A hackathon is a thing where you tech together to create solutions. You have 48 hours to #HacktheCrisis. No pressure. Actually, lots of pressure. Time pressure. Confusion. What was I doing? I rumbled around in a #general zone until I found myself in a team of eight, six of us at our first hackathon, hacking the heck out of an idea that made my heart sing.