“Around the corner, I met Anne Braveman, seventy-nine, and Rita Kahn, eighty-six, who told me they had gone to the movies the week before. It wasn’t some official, prearranged group outing. It was just two friends who decided they wanted to go see The King’s Speech on a Thursday night… A nursing assistant had to agree to join them. Braveman was paralyzed from the waist down due to multiple sclerosis and got around by motorized wheelchair; Kahn was prone to falls and needed a walker. They had to pay the $15 fare for a wheelchair-accessible vehicle to take them. But it was possible for them to go. They were looking forward to watching Sex and the City on DVD next.
“Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey yet?” Kahn asked me, impishly.
I allowed, modestly, that I had not.
“I had never heard of chains and that stuff,” she said, marvelling. Had I? she wanted to know.
I really didn’t want to answer that…”
(from Being Mortal by Atul Gawande)
We do not stop having fun when we get old.
We get old when we stop having fun…
THE END
Credits: Image from searchgi.com
