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Kaleidoscope – Winter/Spring 2004

Perspectives on Aging: I Am Still Learning

Number 48

Winter/Spring 2004

Ann Stapleton

Dedicated to “exploring the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts,” Kaleidoscope subverts the usual categories of “normal” and “disabled” by bringing the reader inside the phenomenon of disability as it affects the life of one (normal) person at a time.

Dedicated to “exploring the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts,” Kaleidoscope subverts the usual categories of “normal” and “disabled” by bringing the reader inside the phenomenon of disability as it affects the life of one (normal) person at a time. Elizabeth Cohen’s “The Beginning of Memory,” an excerpt from The Family on Beartown Road, is the beautifully realized memoir of a single mother simultaneously caring for a daughter just beginning her life and a father being drawn inexorably toward the unhappy ending of Alzheimer’s: “Learning and forgetting are not so different, really. There is a pattern to the way they happen. In both there is powerful emotion, the sense of recognition, the sense of loss.” Gail Willmott offers a heartening piece on Elizabeth “Grandma” Layton, whose venture into painting at the age of sixty-eight brought an end to forty years of unremitting depression. And Erika Lutz’s Mishpocheh (family) is an intricate exploration of how, miraculously, human beings hold on to one another, despite the world’s attempts to make us let go. As you read Kaleidoscope, assumptions and too-easy labeling fall away, and you come to the understanding that everyone is disabled to one degree or another (sometimes in ways you can’t see), and that everyone you meet, subject to gravity and ending, is struggling in his own way against pain and loss, is hoping love and joy will find him somehow, small as he is, somewhere on Earth. 

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