One 78-year-old says he loves his profession and can't imagine stepping back from his work. "I'll retire in a wooden box," he said.
Peter Kraus started working the day after he turned 18, when he was hired by an uncle who was a rare book dealer. Sixty years later, he's still selling books and loving it.
Bringing 2021 into focus
Elizabeth Frederick
Early in January 2021 as we gratefully exited 2020 – which virtually everyone agrees was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, to borrow from Judith Viorst – I ran across an article entitled, “How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This.”
The New York Times article by John Leland was part of a series started almost six years ago which followed six people age 85 and older. By the start of the pandemic, only one of the individuals, Ruth, was still alive.
Ruth struggles with social isolation, questions why she should go on and takes joy in flowers on her Christmas cactus.
How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This
No visitors. No friends at the dining table. Neighbors dying without notice. But many older adults have proved resilient during the pandemic, a phenomenon known as “crisis competence.”
Like the rest of us, Ruth Willig, 97, found pandemic life depressing. Lately things have been improving.Credit.Judith Willig
Jan. 1, 2021
It was sometime in the spring that Ruth Willig, then 96, first compared her pandemic life to being in prison. My mother, Dorothy, was still alive then, in a building much like the assisted-living facility in Brooklyn where Ruth lives. The buildings had shut down all visitors and stopped all group activities, including meals in the dining room. Residents spent their days in their apartments, alone.