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Book

Making the best of what's left : when we're too old to get the chairs reupholstered

Call Number

  • 921 V798 (OSH)

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Edition

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

Publication Information

New York : Simon & Schuster, 2025.

Physical Description

174 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm

Summary

Throughout her career, Judith Viorst has written numerous books reflecting on life as she ages. Now in her nineties, she shares her experiences in life's "final fifth" in this collection of poetry and essays. On her retirement community, she notes that it is "wonderful, marvelous, swell--good as gold. Except for this one little problem: everyone's old." On her late husband (who died of COVID-19 in 2022), she pleads: "I need you fixing our damn circuit breakers. I need you! Could you please stop being dead?" With humor and vulnerability, Viorst invites readers to dance with her between grief and levity and to enjoy the time we have left to share.

Contents

  • About this book
  • A valentine for the extremely married
  • Home
  • Our sensible safe retirement community
  • Old
  • Losing it
  • What's left
  • Grow old along with me and my home health aide
  • A little while
  • Stop being dead
  • Counting the dead
  • What else I remember
  • Afterward
  • An afterlife
  • Happiness
  • Getting out the vote
  • Loneliness
  • A Jewish widow's country-western love song
  • Community
  • Princess Margaret, Pearl Harbor, "daffodils," etc.
  • Wisdom
  • Prescription
  • Epilogue.

Subjects