Worth Knowing by Wendy Lustbader Wendy Lustbader

¶ … Worth Knowing by Wendy Lustbader

Wendy Lustbader is the author of What's Worth Knowing. As a geriatric social worker, she met the experts on love, loss, suffering and intelligence --the older clients she has encountered over a span of more then two decades. For her new book, real people offer hard-won wisdom: the most significant piece of information each has gleaned through seventy, eighty, and ninety-plus years of living. Their first hand experiences of facing hardship, finding love, taking risks, and living without regret; she gathers the many lessons she learned from her plain-speaking older mentors. Lustbader is a teacher at the University of Washington School of Social Work and a mental health counselor in Seattle.

The book captures the pulse and flavor of the individual contributors; every one of the single-paged accounts reverberates with a spirit of great generosity and sincerity. A short, stirring biographical note and sometimes a photo accompanies each story. In her book Lustbader asks, what factors make life superior? Moreover, how do we live it? What do we know now that we wish we had known when we were young (er)? What advice would we give a young (er) person just starting out in life? Has anyone in our life taught us a valuable lesson? What was that lesson? If we could live our life over again, what would we do differently? What would we keep the same?

Despite the fact that we have delved into these undying questions through literature, art, and philosophy, the answers can actually be found much closer to home -- in the hard-won insights of ordinary people. As she recalls, how it all began:

The assignment to listen to the stories of older people had opened up a world of unexpected richness to me. I decided to concentrate on gerontology for the rest of my time in social work school, which meant attending seminars with only three or four fellow students...."

Those people we come across in this book aren't popular names or celebrities, but ordinary individuals, grandparents, neighbors, teachers. In What's Worth Knowing, these seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds reveal the most important part of understanding each has acquired through a lifetime of living. While rearing children, making mistakes, surviving adversity, and ultimately discovering what really matters, they have collected the secrets of triumphing over life's challenges and achieving its joys.

Though some may say that age and wisdom do not necessarily go hand in hand, this affecting volume of personal stories proves just the opposite. All the 104 seniors who offer their thoughts in this volume of reflections have something vital to say about what they found to be most true, most important about life. Lustbader recalls her first case as a student:

We were both enchanted; she with the rush of memories and I with the sense of moving back in time to a way of life that had vanished. We stopped only because it was time for lunch. She grabbed my hand when I stood up to leave and said, "No one has listened to me like that in years."..."

Whether they are revealing the relationship between honesty and wrinkle-free aging or conveying parenting guidance gained through raising prize-winning tomatoes, the energetic expressions in What's Worth Knowing put across life's collective contentment and regrets with unforgettable poignancy and understanding.

At ninety-eight Agnes McDougal, can even now taste the sweetness of an apple given to her by a stranger on a train when she was seventeen, tells us "kindness is never wasted." Having lived more than eighty years in the same small Massachusetts town, Bo Jackson reckons that "someplace else may always seem better, but where nobody knows you, you're nothing." Harold Jones, who in his seventy-six long years has never suffered a lonely instant, says "A good listener is someone who's not talking."