Abstract
This chapter is an autobiographical introduction to Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle. It recounts how I came to live in Toronto in my seventh decade, after a lifetime in New York, and describes how my work as an early childhood educator, and my life as a gay man and caregiver to two elderly parents, led me to write about the common themes that spiral through our lives regardless of age.
The book opens in a physician’s office when an overly conscientious doctor speculates that I may have multiple myeloma. After spending the preceding year successfully preparing for my 70th birthday, I find that this dagger of a diagnosis—which turned out to be wrong—brings a new urgency to thinking about aging and the time I have left.
For age is an opportunity no less than youth itself….
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Silin, J.G. (2018). A Life-Changing Diagnosis: Mapping Common Ground Between Young and Old. In: Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle. Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71628-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71628-2_1
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71627-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71628-2
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