Stories from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal that both include the perspectives of Northeast Ohioans might put you in a philosophical mood.

The Post's article looks at the frustration that some adult children feel over the cavalier approach some of their parents take to the coronavirus by "engaging in behavior that fills their middle-aged children with terror, for both their parents' health and their own."

Bill Thomas, a geriatrician and founder of ChangingAging.org, tells the Post, "As we get older, we are more likely to lose the illusion of immortality compared to younger people. Older people are more likely to be living with the awareness that they are in fact mortal and they have a limited amount of time left. Many older people are more conscious of weighing the risk-benefit based on the knowledge that they're not going to be around much longer. So you make some different calculations than younger people."

From the piece:

JoAnn Schaffer, 89, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, dons masks when she goes out and avoids in-person shopping, but she recently had her hairdresser come to her house and hosted a bridge party on her patio much to her 62-year-old daughter's chagrin.

"I have a different perspective," she said. "I'm old, and if I die, I die. If it's going to kill someone, let it happen to the older people. I've lived my life."

Her hairdresser wore a mask, and they opened the windows. As for the bridge players, "we took our masks off. There was a beautiful breeze. These are people I've known for 30 years, and they're clean."

Her daughter, Ann Schaffer Shirreffs of Cleveland, said she knows she can't tell her mother what to do: "At this point, she's almost 90 years old, and if she wants to get together with three other ladies and sit less than six feet from each other and handle the cards, what can I say? There's nothing I can say." Still, she said, "I lose sleep over it."

Thomas tells the paper that younger people shouldn't try to change older parents' activities: "It's a really ageist presumption on the part of these 60-year-old children that they get to tell their parents what to do. They get to do whatever they want. My message to the 60-year-olds is: Get over it. Let them live their life."

Meanwhile, author Bruce Feiler in this Wall Street Journal piece writes about how a string of personal crises a life-threatening illness, a near bankruptcy, the attempted suicide of his father, led him to spend "the past five years crisscrossing the country, collecting the life stories of 225 Americans of all ages and walks of life, from all 50 states, who'd been through similar life disruptions. With a team of 12, I then spent a year coding these interviews for 57 different variables from what emotions people most struggled with, to what advice from friends they found most helpful, to what habits they shed identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change."

One person included in the Journal article is Ann Ramer, a schoolteacher in Cleveland, who spent a decade in hospital wards after two of her children got multiple cancers from a hereditary disorder. She said that she learned to challenge herself, speak up, even lobby before Congress.

"This wasn't the life I expected. Just think, it's raining cancer in my house. But it was the life I got. I'm a different person now, and I'm proud of how I reacted," Ramer tells Feiler.

The piece is adapted from Feiler's new book, "Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age," which will be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday, July 14.

Read the original:

'Let them live their life' - Crain's Cleveland Business