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      How I Met My Father

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      “What took you so long?” he said.Fathers don’t fare well in my fiction. They are white supremacist killers and domestic abusers. They trick their wives into becoming pregnant. They have affairs. They abandon their families.My biological father, Albert Coleman Bryan Jr., was 22 when I was born. He was a dashing air force pilot who flew off into the wide blue yonder, leaving my mother and me grounded.He had red curly hair and freckles and a charming grin. It’s a face I don’t remember, if indeed I ever saw it. My parents split up around the time I was born.I grew up tasting the bitterness of my father’s absence, especially at Christmas, when he sent me expensive presents. My mother would hand them to me without a word, and I would know to go into my closet to open them.By then, she had remarried. In addition to a stepdad, I had a brother and sister. Our stockings were filled with bananas and oranges, little else.In my closet, I would open the presents from my father, with cards signed by his secretary or someone in a store. Among the many gifts over the years, he sent me a pearl necklace, a portable typewriter and a birthstone ring. I’d know to tuck them away in my closet and never to mention them to my brother and sister.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Care for Yourself as a Caregiver

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      Forget yoga or weekend escapes. There are more realistic tools to put in place, experts say.Once a quarter, Bich Le, 52, travels from her home outside of Minneapolis to St. Augustine, Fla., where she moves into her father’s guest room for three weeks.The health care executive is one of five siblings who take turns caring for their widowed 90-year-old father, who has lung cancer and requires constant assistance. While she’s in Florida this month, she will miss her daughter’s final high school prom; she missed it last year, too, due to her caregiving duties.The drugs Ms. Le’s father takes to manage pain can “negatively impact how he treats people,” she said. When he becomes volatile, Ms. Le said, she mostly tries to ignore it and “not add to the stress of the situation.” She tells herself to “just care for him and just let it go.” But sometimes, when she’s exhausted, his temper grates.“What runs through my brain is: ‘A simple thank you would really go a long way,’” she said. “‘You have me, or you have a nursing home.’”Caregiving can be fraught for the estimated 53 million Americans who assist family members and friends. And factors like financial strain and isolation can add to psychological distress. In a 2017 survey of 1,081 caregivers conducted by AARP, 51 percent of respondents reported feeling worried or stressed. But there was a surprising upside: The majority — 91 percent — also reported feeling pleased that they were able to help.How can caregivers hold on to that feeling amid the stress, fatigue and resentment that also come with the role? There are strategies for feeling “less burdened or stressed by the daily problems” they encounter, said William Haley, a professor of aging studies at the University of South Florida.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Older Daters are Coping With the Surge in S.T.I.s

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      Older daters are not getting adequate screening and protection from S.T.I.s. Here’s how to be a safer sexually active senior.Since her marriage of more than 20 years ended in divorce, Amy, a 62-year-old Texan, has had a couple of committed relationships and a handful of sexual partners.Amy is currently seeing a man she described as a “friend with benefits,” but it’s nothing she takes too seriously. What she does take seriously is talking to him — and every partner — about safe sex practices amid rising rates of sexually transmitted infections in seniors.“I’m very aware of it,” said Amy, who asked to use only her middle name to protect her privacy. “I require proof of negative testing before I become intimate with anyone.” She also insists on using a condom.Between 2012 and 2022, rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia more than doubled among those 55 and older, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research suggests many older people are unaware of these risks, and that’s keeping them from adequate screening and practicing safer sex.Joan Price, a sex educator who focuses on senior sexuality and who is the author of “Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex,” said she was struck by the variety of reasons older daters may not practice safe sex, or even talk about it with partners.She often hears some version of, “Oh, I can’t get pregnant,” she said, or “Our age group doesn’t get S.T.I.s.” Men have told her they were reluctant to talk about barrier methods of protection because their erections were unpredictable, and using a condom made them go away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lawsuit Puts Fresh Focus on Eric Hovde’s Comments About Older Voters

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      Pressed on his claims of 2020 election irregularities, the Republican candidate for Senate in Wisconsin has questioned the mental capacity of nursing home residents to vote.Eric Hovde, the Republican banking executive challenging Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, may be developing a problem with older voters.The bank he leads, Utah-based Sunwest, last month was named as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit that accuses a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.Mr. Hovde’s campaign called the suit meritless and said it was farcical to hold the chairman and chief executive of a bank responsible for the actions of a business that it seized in a foreclosure in 2021. Whatever its merits, the suit might have been largely irrelevant to Mr. Hovde’s political campaign had he himself not boasted recently of having gained expertise in the nursing home industry as a lender to such residences.In comments this month in which he suggested there had been irregularities in the 2020 election, Mr. Hovde drew on that experience to say that residents of nursing homes “have a five-, six-month life expectancy” and that “almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.” Those remarks were quickly condemned by Democrats in Wisconsin and by the former Milwaukee Bucks star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.The recent pileup of problems is an inauspicious start to a campaign that Republicans hope will help wrest control of the Senate from Democrats. Mr. Hovde is one of four affluent Republicans who are running to unseat Democratic incumbents, in Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Each of those states either leans heavily Republican in the upcoming presidential contest or is rated a tossup, and the loss of any one of those seats could cost Democrats control of the Senate. The deep pockets of candidates like Mr. Hovde will ease the G.O.P.’s heavy fund-raising burden as the party confronts Democrats’ early financial advantage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden, Trump and Dr. Bob: the Human Realities of Aging on the Job

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      He had become the local expert on what he called the “unwanted side effects of old age,” so Dr. Bob Ross, 75, rubbed arthritis cream onto his hands and walked into an exam room to see his seventh elderly patient of the day. He had been a doctor in the remote town of Ortonville, Minn., for nearly five decades, caring for most of its 2,000 residents as he aged alongside them. He delivered their children, performed their high school physicals, tended to their workplace injuries and now specialized in treating the wide-ranging symptoms of what it meant to grow old in America.“What’s hurting you most today?” he asked Nancy Scoblic, 79.“Let me take out my list,” she said. “Sore knees. Bad lungs. I’ve got a spot on my leg and pain in my shoulder. Basically, if it doesn’t hurt now, it’ll probably hurt later.”She’d known him for most of her life, first as Bobby, whom her family sometimes babysat, then as Bob in high school, and now as Dr. Bob — the physician who had cared for her grandparents and also her grandchildren, and who almost everyone in Ortonville entrusted with their most vulnerable moments. It was behind the closed door of Dr. Bob’s exam room where hundreds of people filled out their advance directives, took cognitive evaluations and tested out their new walkers and hearing aids. It was Dr. Bob who delivered bad news with a farmer’s directness and then sat with families around a hospice bed for hours when the only thing left to do was to pray.Most of his patients were white, geriatric and still largely self-sufficient — members of the same demographic as the country’s two leading presidential candidates in the 2024 election, 81-year-old Joe Biden and 77-year-old Donald Trump. The conversations at the heart of an election cycle were the same ones unfolding inside Bob’s office: What were the best ways to slow the inevitable decline of the human body? How did aging impact cognition? When was it possible to defy age, and when was it necessary to make accommodations in terms of decision-making or professional routines. These were the questions he asked his patients each day, and also himself.He took Nancy’s hand and helped her onto the exam table, checking for circulatory problems as he felt her lymph nodes and her carotid artery for signs of swelling. He pressed his hands against her abdomen to seek out masses in the liver or enlargement of the spleen. It was the same geriatric exam he conducted at least 25 times each week, as Ortonville’s soybean farmers aged into retirement and America’s baby boomers arrived in his office showing more evidence of cancer, more bruises from falls, more diabetes, more strokes and more signs of memory loss and possible dementia.Bob helps Nancy Scoblic with her coat after an appointment. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Albany Should Pass Parole Reforms

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      Scientists have found that most cells in our bodies regenerate every seven to 10 years on average. This includes certain cells in the heart and brain. Can we assume, then, that our moral and emotional compasses are also capable of transforming over time?As a New York State parole commissioner for 12 years, I evaluated the readiness for release and risk to public safety of more than 75,000 incarcerated people. I saw these changes in people every day.Yet in spite of those transformations, the number of aging long-termers warehoused in prisons has only increased in recent years.Two bills in the New York State Legislature could challenge that trend. Both would give people in prison fairer shots at parole. Versions of this legislation have been introduced since 2018 but were never put to a vote. This year, lawmakers should pass them.Many long-termers languish in cells or in substandard prison infirmaries, or even in so-called long-term care units. With labored breathing, they limp to the mess hall and miss their chance to eat, sink deeper into dementia, fall and get seriously injured, and navigate hearing and vision impairment. At the same time, they are under the supervision of guards who lack the training and often the empathy to properly manage the diminished capacity of many older people to follow often senseless prison rules.When I was a commissioner, from 1984 to 1996, it was unusual for me to meet a parole candidate over the age of 50. Now there are more than 7,500 incarcerated people ages 50 and older in New York, or about 25 percent of the entire state prison population. In fact, between 2008 and 2021, the overall prison population declined by half, yet the population age 50 and older increased, with ballooning health care costs crowding out other budget priorities. The state spends between $100,000 and $240,000 on incarcerated people who are 55 or older, according to one of the reform measures before the State Legislature; for others, the figure is about $60,000.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Grow Old Like Isabella Rossellini

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      If you go to Isabella Rossellini’s Instagram page — and I recommend you do — you will see the 71-year-old actress/director/model/farmer wearing a giant woolly hat and vest, beaming with joy in the sunshine at her farm on Long Island. Another photo shows her staring off into the distance, her face proudly unretouched. Scrolling through, I often wonder how Rossellini is so comfortable in her own skin at an age when many women struggle in theirs.Rossellini’s early life was, in some ways, defined by other people’s fame. She looks strikingly like her mother, the Swedish Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman. Her father, the director Roberto Rossellini, was a giant of Italian cinema. She was married to Martin Scorsese, and another partner, David Lynch, famously directed her in the 1986 film “Blue Velvet.” But she also built her own interesting and varied career, becoming one of the most recognizable models in the world as the face of Lancôme until, in her 40s, the beauty brand dumped her for being too old. Rossellini was suddenly faced with a question, she told me, that she’s still working through today: “Who am I, and how do I fulfill the rest of my life?”The short answer is that she wrote books, went back to school, bought a farm, learned to be single, got rehired by Lancôme and kept acting. In the film “La Chimera,” directed by the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher and opening in theaters on March 29, Rossellini plays a Tuscan matriarch who’s aging with a lot less equanimity than Isabella herself. (She also has a small part in the new film “Spaceman,” starring Adam Sandler.) Rossellini just started “a little experiment with sheep” at her farm, partnering with design schools to help students better understand wool, and describes herself as diligently following whatever amuses her. “I just play,” she says. “I’m playful. And I became increasingly more playful with age.”I will confess that I have been slightly obsessing over your farm, where you are right now. It’s clearly both a refuge and also hard work. Did you always think this is what you’d be doing in your 70s? Because when I dream of my 70s, I’m not working quite as hard as you are. Well, you know, I say you need two ingredients to open a farm: optimism and ignorance. Optimism is like: Oh, it’s a piece of a dream, wouldn’t it be great to have it? Sure, I can do a farm! And ignorance is how hard it is — how hard it is workwise, but also to make it financially viable. All these little farms in the Hudson Valley or in Long Island, we are all struggling. How do you make it? Yet it’s such a contribution to the community, and it opened up so many possibilities and fills my mind with wonder, and I have to study hard to understand how to run it well.What is it about the hard work that you find so compelling? There are little farms that don’t exist anymore, because there’s no money and it’s a lot of work. So why do it? It started with my love for animals. I always had dogs and cats, and then my father, when I was 14 years old, gave me Konrad Lorenz’s book “King Solomon’s Ring.” Lorenz is a founder of the science of ethology — the science of animal behavior — and I read that book. It was like an illumination. This is what I want to do. And when I became older and there was less work as a model and as an actress and my children were grown up, I thought, Well, maybe I’ll go back to school and study ethology. And so in my 60s, I signed up.Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini in 1954 with their children, Isabella, Ingrid and Roberto.Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Older Americans React to Special Counsel Report on Biden

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      President Biden’s age has once again become a talking point in national politics. Many older Americans agree that it’s an issue; others feel it’s insulting. Bill Murphy, an 80-year-old retired veterinarian in suburban Phoenix, sometimes blanks on names he could once summon with ease, so he has empathy for 81-year-old President Biden. But he winced when he watched Mr. Biden defend his mental sharpness at a news conference, only to mix up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico. Mr. Murphy, a Republican, believes Mr. Biden is not up to another term.Mary Meyer, an 83-year-old avid hiker and traveler who lives in the high desert north of Phoenix, took issue with a special counsel’s report that characterized him as elderly and forgetful — a similar assumption that strangers at the supermarket sometimes make about her capabilities. “I look at him as a peer,” said Ms. Meyer, who plans to vote for Mr. Biden. “I know what he’s capable of. I know it’s not as bad as everybody thinks.”To voters in their 70s and 80s, the renewed questions swirling around Mr. Biden’s age and fitness resonated in deeply personal ways. The special counsel report cleared him of criminal charges in his handling of classified documents but described him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”Some of Mr. Biden’s generational peers and supporters insisted the characterization was nothing more than a calculated political ploy to undercut his campaign, and play on perceived weakness. Many noted their own vibrant and busy lives, filled with mental and physical activity.The criticism of Mr. Biden as forgetful and incapable of serving echoed slights and discrimination they had felt. Others thought of their own struggles as they hit their 80s, and questioned any 80-year-old’s ability to lead the nation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More