Musings on Memory and Aging

Selected for the UCSF Memory and Aging Center by Hellman Visiting Artist Jane Hirshfield

This poem is by Shirley Kaufman, a poet (and friend) now returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after having lived in Jerusalem for 37 years. Her most recent books are Threshold, published when she was 80, and Ezekiel’s Wheels, published when she was 86, both from Copper Canyon Press. Many of the poems in both books reflect on memory and memory loss, aging and death. “’Ninety’” is a poem of reality-embrace. Looking face to face at acknowledged losses, its words hold as well a person surrendering no part of the fully passionate self, and one who knows that what is past in any individual life is also part of the larger truth of all things’ passing. Read more

The questions raised at the annual research education event on sleep were both provocative and intuitive, many of which referred to aspects of our ongoing sleep research program at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. We are currently investigating sleep, circadian rhythms and cognition in both healthy aging and neurodegenerative disease. Read more

Selected for the UCSF Memory and Aging Center by Hellman Visiting Artist Jane Hirshfield

For April—National Poetry Month—here are two poems that hold two strongly different responses to aging, with a small connection between them. The first, by the American poet Dan Gerber, opens with an epigraph from the Chinese T’ang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (now often spelled Du Fu). The second poem, by Tu Fu himself, is one of the most widely known poems by China’s most famous poet. It may be worth noting the obvious: one poem depicts aging in the midst of a strong sense of family and connection, while the other is a poem written in, and about, immense solitude. Read more