Summer List, Part 3

In addition to our previous summer viewing/reading suggestions, we add one more book, Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother and the Lessons of a Lifetime by Scott Simon.  From the book's description:  "Unforgettable . . . [is] a memoir that is rich, heart-wrenching and exhilarating. . . . Spending their last days together in a hospital's ICU, mother and son reflect on their lifetime's worth of memories, recounting stories laced with humor and exemplifying resilience."

While this book might be considered an atypical "justice and peace" selection, it gives a very moving description of health care for an underserved population in the United States -- the elderly.  It is a great grace that several Sister of Christian Charity lovingly minister among this population.  We are grateful to all of those who provide care not only for our older Sisters, but for the elderly in the neighborhoods where we live and in the places we minister.  

Here is a sample of Unforgettable (p. 26), providing an example of what is discussed above:

"My mother was right:  America pastes decals on old people.  They are identified as a demographic group, a market, or a political lobby, but often feel invisible, unheard, and powerless as individuals.  People talk past them, as we do to children.  Their bodies start failing them, fighting them.  To be old in America is to live in a world in which you have to take pills but can't pry open the bottles, and can't open a drugstore pocket comb because it comes encased in a protective packaging fit for the Agra Diamond.  The elderly are accused of slurping up government benefits and medical care in a way that poisons our children's future.  Every marketer and media company wants to suck up what's inside their wallets, but avoid the taint of being identified with the cranky, wrinkly oldsters.  Intricate technologies bark at them from cold screens for passwords they can't (can any of us?) remember, and actions that might as well be commands in an ancient Parthian language.

My mother had come into a hospital for a quick stick in her finger to see if she was sick.  She had planned to have lunch, and dawdle in front of the store windows; she had planned to fly to see her grandchildren the next day.  But instead, she'd been whisked into a ward, jolted, jabbed, and speared without anyone she recognized as a doctor ever really saying why.  And now my mother was being asked, in so many words, if she was ready to give up breathing to get a better view.  Has medical care become so compartmentalized that the first inkling a patient gets that her case is untreatable is when the palliative care team circles the bed?"