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do elderly reminisce mainly about the best time of their life? Reminiscing is any age talking about things you've experienced or done in the past whether good or bad. I think the percentages for reminiscing are about the same for any age.
I have an elderly friend who reminisces quite a bit about her childhood. She has an incredible memory and has written down her stories in a "book" and provided it to her children. She lived during the depression and her family lost everything in the Ohio River flood in the late 30's - had to jump out of window into a boat. Then went to live in the city (Cincinnati) in a cold water flat and she spent the rest of her childhood in bad neighborhoods. Most of her reminisces are about the flood and dealing with the difficulties of the city and her mother's bad health. Some happy memories but even those are a little sad. Guess it was just the defining point of her life or perhaps she finds it cathartic (sp?) to talk about it.
I have an elderly friend who reminisces quite a bit about her childhood. She has an incredible memory and has written down her stories in a "book" and provided it to her children. She lived during the depression and her family lost everything in the Ohio River flood in the late 30's - had to jump out of window into a boat. Then went to live in the city (Cincinnati) in a cold water flat and she spent the rest of her childhood in bad neighborhoods. Most of her reminisces are about the flood and dealing with the difficulties of the city and her mother's bad health. Some happy memories but even those are a little sad. Guess it was just the defining point of her life or perhaps she finds it cathartic (sp?) to talk about it.
I would love to read her life story. We live near the Ohio....that flood in the 1930's flooded 17 miles on each side of the river....quite a flood - quite a devastating flood.
I don't believe so. My elderly mother has lived with me for the past eight years. Even before that, I was close to my dad and spent a lot of time with him in the last decade of his life. My observation: the talk of the past the elderly engage in is not exactly the same as "reminiscing" that people do at other ages.
We all have events in our lives that we remember fondly are happy to think/talk about at various times. But what the elderly in my life do is more like an automatic reflex rather than a reminiscence. My mother hears something (from me, from the TV, from a guest ... it doesn't matter) and it seems to trigger a memory (usually from the FAR past) in her brain and she has a compulsion to say it aloud rather than just think it. The memory can be totally irrelevant to the previous conversation and is just as often is a boring memory (or a bad one) than a good one that I would think of as a "reminiscence."
My mother always was talkative but my father was NOT — yet his "memory ventings" were as common as hers. I actually enjoyed his, because I found out more about his childhood in the last five years of his life than I did in the previous 45 years put together. He had been abused by any stretch of today's definition and while he finally talked about that, he was completely void of any anger about it. When I would reply, "Your parents should have been in jail!" he would say, "Oh, honey, that's the way it was in those days. Everyone treated their kids like that." Well, maybe in the poverty-stricken world of heavy drinkers he lived in, but certainly not everywhere. But I'm glad I finally found out about it and I didn't through any planned confession on his part. I just put it together from anecdotes he would sprinkle into conversation that may not even been relevant to that topic.
My mother peppers her conversation with old memories, too. While she has intelligent and perceptive NEW things to say, when she veers into the past it's always for something we've heard a hundred times before. I could do her reminiscing FOR her. I can recognize her triggers in advance and often avoid them in my own conversation to avoid a repeat of a yarn I know by heart. In spite of her intelligence, she seems completely unaware that she is repeating something she says, almost word for word, every couple of days. And even if that's pointed out to her, she simply doesn't care and will go on with her story — even if every person in the room is obviously bored by the turn she makes in the conversation.
I think for my parents generation WWll was the greatest years of their lives. They met before the war and then when my dad was overseas for two years they exchanged lots of letters. There was also the songs and the memories and then starting life after the war. It would be hard for any generation to top that . For me it was different. It was college then meeting that life partner and making our own way when we were still pretty young in the early 70's. I have actually had a few pretty good years after retiring that have been very memorable with some new friends in distant places. Life though is shorter on the other end. Some friends have passed away and are greatly missed even though I only knew them for a short while.
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