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By Muriel R. Gillick
341 pp, $16.95
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-6740-2543-1

JAMA. 2008;300(14):1701.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Given that my grandfather lived to the ripe old age of 111 years, I was able to enjoy his company well into my own adulthood. While visiting one day, when I was still a callow medical student (aged 25), I asked him (aged 105) what it was really like to be so old. He thought for a moment and answered me briefly. I can still recall my grandfather's soft voice and especially his Yiddish-inflected accent—he had arrived in Toronto at the beginning of the 20th century, direct from Czarist Russia. "There's no problem in getting old," he offered, then paused as I waited for him to qualify. My grandfather partly repeated himself, then offered his punch line, which has stayed with me all these years: "There's no problem in getting old,but if you get sick . . . it's goodbye Charlie!"

I thought of my grandfather and his gerontological philosophy as I read this . . . [Full Text of this Article]

A. Mark Clarfield, MD, FRCPC, Reviewer
Department of Geriatrics
Soroka Hospital
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Beer-Sheva, Israel
Division of Geriatric Medicine
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
markclar@bgu.ac.il

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