Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents

This book deals with the geriatric decline connected to non-terminal illness in old age. Tom Koch takes a look at the declining years of his father. The book is a narrative record of an elderly man unable to accept the physical realities of his state. Because it is told by the patient's caregiver, a son, it also chronicles the issues and mechanics of the ageing child's role in caring for a parent. Koch defines ageing as more than a series of physical symptoms and places the issues of caring and ageing within the perspective of socially accepted values; interdependence, social function, family dynamics, and financial worth. The patient, his physicians and nurses, family and friends all become ciphers in the code by which we define not only aging and the elderly, but time, history, and ourselves. "Mirrored Lives" offers a social document in which the case of one man and his last years becomes a symbol for us all. Koch provides not only a record of the non-terminal decline of an elderly individual - his father - but a perspective which defines the problems of gerontology in a social context. His experiences are a practical example of the psychological aspects of caregiving to the elderly parent and the geriatric decline that parent experiences - decreased mobility, increasing senility. The book places the community's reactions to the elderly's problems in a social context. Thus, ageing is defined as a multi-generational issue, not something which just happens to the patient.