How do you encourage generations to talk with each other about their experiences with aging? Anne Simpson of St. Paul is very interested in the topic for a number of reasons. “The main one is that I seem to be doing it quite rapidly and without even trying,” says the 81-year-old.
Simpson had no intention of turning her stories into a book until one day in 2016 when she had a very interesting conversation with her granddaughter. “Ali came home from college to visit and I asked her if she ever thought about getting old and if she had any questions. To my delight and surprise, she said, ‘Yeah, I do.’”
In her new book, Do You Feel As Old As You Are? Conversations with My Granddaughter, Simpson shares the answers to 40 questions posed by her 21-year-old granddaughter, Alison Leslie. Among the questions she was asked: Are you afraid of dying? How do you want to be remembered? Anything that you really regret or wish you did differently when you were younger? What do you hope to live to see?
With Ali back in school, grandmother and granddaughter corresponded back and forth—questions and answers by e-mail and phone. Simpson wrote some more vignettes, structured the material around Ali’s questions, and realized there was enough content for a book.
She approached Bill Huff of Huff Publishing in Edina, Minn. The company had earlier published another of her books, Through the Wilderness of Alzheimer’s: A Guide in Two Voices (originally published by Augsburg Fortress), as well as the curriculum based on it for churches ministering to families with dementia.
Simpson wrote the first book with her husband, Bob, as he was dealing with the mind-robbing disease. Robert Simpson, who once served pastorates at Wayzata Community Church and Macalester-Plymouth Church St Paul, died of complications related to Alzheimer’s Disease in 2011. He was 78.
Do You Feel As Old As You Are? Conversations with My Granddaughter was released in December 2016. Simpson hopes the book will help bring the generations together and spread the message that aging, a topic that has been avoided or ignored for a long time, is one we all need to talk about openly now. The Boomers are retiring!
According to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to more than double from 46 million today to over 98 million by 2060, and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population will rise to nearly 24 percent from 15 percent.
Copies of Do You Feel As Old As You Are? Conversations with My Granddaughter are available for purchase online through the publisher, www.huffpublishing.com and at www.amazon.com
They can also be ordered at bookstores everywhere.
Editor’s note: Anne is the wife of the late Bob Simpson who was pastor at the First Congregational Church in Grand Marais first in the 1960s and later served as an interim pastor at First Congregational in the 1990s.
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