Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Lately, I have been pondering Keats's poem “To Autumn,” which opens with the venerable description of fall as a “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” By blending the soft, sorrowful language of the maturating season with imagery of ripening and fulfillment, Keats demonstrates the oppositional nature of aging, a process that gives even as it takes away. When it comes to dementia, our age-phobic culture dwells mostly on the “mists” of brain aging—its mental fogginess, drifting moods, and gathering decrements. Seldom do we allow ourselves to see through the melancholic mists and appreciate the subtle harvest of late life still ripening in aging older adults. Last summer, I traveled from Cleveland, Ohio, to Oxford University in England to write up my doctoral research, which was based on a study at The Intergenerational School (TIS) in Cleveland, which serves 175 low-income children from the city and welcomes older community members as “mentors.” For this project, I had worked closely with eight residents of a local assisted living home called Judson Park—all with mild to moderate dementia—who volunteered as mentors once a week at TIS, reading with students and sharing their life histories through guided interviews. My aim was to evaluate whether the intergenerational volunteering experience would enhance quality of life for these folks. Over the course of the intervention, I had become well acquainted with one of the intervention group participants, a 93-year-old woman named Dr. Genevieve Miller (Figure 1). Dr. Miller had grown up in a small steel-manufacturing town in western Pennsylvania with a population of 25,000. No one in her family had attended college, and her father, a God-fearing Methodist who ran a prosperous tire shop, had strongly advised her against choosing an academic path. However, through her scholarship, Dr. Miller eventually escaped what she called “the tyranny of my upbringing” and was admitted to Goucher College, where she studied chemistry and became interested in the history of medicine. This scholarly pursuit led to a master's degree in medical history at The Johns Hopkins University, after which she matriculated to Cornell University, becoming the first woman in the United States to obtain a doctorate in medical history. Dr. Genevieve Miller with a student, Calvin Chism, at The Intergenerational School. Still a great source of pride for Dr. Miller, this degree was invoked in nearly every conversation she and I shared. So too was it recapitulated during most fortnightly interview sessions she held with the 6th- and 7th-grade students at TIS who recorded her life history. Although she sometimes struggled for clarity, Dr. Miller would attempt to link the narrative of her youth with the realities of her student partners to communicate that education was the route out of poverty. At the study's end, she asked if she could donate two old bookshelves and several hundred textbooks and novels from her personal library to TIS students. This gift seemed to represent a means of continuing her professional commitment to seeding future generations with knowledge, even though her days as a formal educator were over. Soon after returning to Oxford to write up the data I had gathered from Dr. Miller and others, I was invited to the flat of a good friend for a home-cooked dinner. As we sliced up vegetables and boiled pasta in the kitchen, one of my friend's housemates meandered in, and we struck up a conversation. I learned that he was a medical historian researching smallpox in the 17th century. This, of course, stoked my memories of Dr. Miller, and I mentioned that a woman in my study had been a renowned medical historian who also specialized in smallpox. With a curious tone, the housemate asked: “What is this woman's name?” When I said “Genevieve Miller” his eyes lit up and his jaw dropped in a gesture of incredulity the English describe as being “gobsmacked.” He said: “Genevieve Miller! I've read her books and cited her at least a dozen times in my thesis!” He went on to say how admiring he was of Dr. Miller's prolific career, and even printed out the pages of his thesis in which he had rigorously cited her scholarly works. Before I arrived back in Cleveland in the early autumn, I wrote this story down and e-mailed it to one of the administrators at Judson Park to pass along to Dr. Miller and her closest friends. The staff members who were present when Dr. Miller read the story told me that when she put the paper down she looked up at everyone in the room and beamed. It gave me great joy to honor my old friend, who through the gathering mists of her senescence, still managed to live a life that bore its mellow fruits and nourished the minds of a new generation of scholars, from the dreaming spires of Oxford to the urban classrooms of Cleveland. Conflict of Interest: The editor in chief has reviewed the conflict of interest checklist provided by the author and has determined that the author has no financial or any other kind of personal conflicts with this paper. This research was undertaken as part of DRG's doctoral research in the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University, which was supported by the Overseas Research Student fund. Additional funding for fieldwork was provided by the Shigeo & Megumi Takayama Foundation and the Greenwall Foundation through The Intergenerational School, which hired DRG as a researcher. Funding for writing was provided by the Fondation Médéric Alzheimer and Alzheimer's Disease International. Author Contributions: The author was solely responsible for study concept, design, analysis, and preparation of the manuscript as part of his doctoral research. The author collaborated with Judson Park Retirement Community and The Intergenerational School to acquire subjects and data. Sponsor's Role: The Intergenerational School provided grant support for fieldwork.
Author: Daniel R. George
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1560773076