Editor’s Letter; Things We Love; Megan Nicol Reed

There’s been quite a bit written about how, at a certain point, older people, particularly women, find themselves becoming invisible. They are the last to be served, people walk through them on the street, their opinions aren’t taken seriously. Sounds awful, and, like death, mostly unimaginable until it happens to you. Mostly it’s discussed (and dismissed) through the lens of vanity: losing our sexual allure is hardly the end of the world; we should get over it. But, as Joseph Burgo wrote in an excellent piece for The Atlantic, being no longer “regarded”, can’t help but hurt. Even the most robust among us gets satisfaction from being noticed, or admired. And what happens when you are not only no longer admired, but your opinions are over-ridden, or worse, you are simply ignored? What happens when you are old, and sick, and no one takes your pain or illness seriously? This happens frequently and it happened to Elayn Gemmell, a woman whose “vivacity coursed so strongly under her skin,” as her daughter, Nikki Gemmell, writes in an extract from her extraordinary new book, After. It’s a reflection of an often-disharmonious mother-daughter relationship, but more importantly, an examination of how we treat the chronically ill, and why we are so reluctant to listen to them.