As I leave the house to make my now weekly pilgrimage to Oshkosh, I spot one of the kids’ iPods on the kitchen floor. It looks a little odd, and then I see that all that high technology is now held together with electric tape.

The surface appeal is gone, but still it manages to work somehow.

It’s a little like that with Mom. A $90,000 chunk of technology about the size of a cigarette pack is implanted under her skin, about where a breast pocket would be. It paces her heart and, when the rhythm goes all kaplooey, it shocks it back in line. Disconcerting, that.

But now, despite the nifty gizmo and all sorts of expensive pharmaceuticals, her giant heart, filling three quarters of her chest cavity, is failing in its job. As a result, her body is filling up with fluid.

In the past two weeks, she’s gained 20 pounds. It’s in her arms and legs, which the physical therapists wrap with elastic bandages, and in odd bulges around her midriff, which they can’t wrap. Because she’s had two radical mastectomies, in some of the places the fluid would normally go, there aren’t places anymore.

Aside from the discomfort (doctor word), pain (patient word), and fear it causes, congestive heart failure is hell on personal vanity.

I call my friends Sabina, a physician, and Susan, a nurse, to get a pre-trip briefing. So I am prepared for the worst.

Still, heading up Highway 41, the sky is so blue, and there are red barns in fields of oat stubble and snow: beauty all around me. I turn off the radio to make a place that’s quiet enough to let in wisdom greater than my own.

I enter the nursing home, a place of old people and middle-aged daughters. Mom is sleeping: I nudge her awake. She rises, in some pain, but manages to get going.

After she stands for a bit, a pocket of fluid forms beneath her buttock. She makes me feel it, and I am suitably horrified. All the people she has made feel her butt today, including her nurse, a man, have been horrified, she says. We laugh about that.

We walk the halls to a waiting room with nursing-home-mauve-and-blue wing-back chairs and an enormous freight elevator. Odd décor even for a nursing home, I suggest. Mom climbs on: 117 pounds.

That’s three less than yesterday. The diuretics are starting to work at last. The many bathroom trips last night begin to feel less onerous.

And today becomes an up-day on the rollercoaster. 

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh asked, “Does our looks-obsessed culture want to stare at an aging woman?” The woman in question was Hillary Clinton, of course.

“It's like almost an addiction that some people have to what I call the perfection that Hollywood presents of successful, beautiful, fun-loving people. So the question is this: Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”

He illustrated his point with an exceptionally unflattering photo of the Democratic party presidential candidate next to an exceptionally presidential photo of Mitt Romney and concluded that the Republican is much prettier and therefore more electable. In other words, a better presidential candidate.

The same day, 24-year-old Amanda Hinsperger asked: “What is it about anti-aging?. . .Women in particular carry the anti-aging burden, since most anti-aging ads are marketed to women. Are we afraid of aging? Does the natural course of life disturb us? Nobody likes to admit their body is failing. With all the stress this worrying brings on, and with the aging impacts of stress, maybe we'd be doing ourselves a favour by embracing age.”

Offensive as Limbaugh’s screed is, his observations about our culture’s fear, even hatred, of aging, are sound.

I don’t know how to change that, but Gene D. Cohen, MD, PhD, Director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at The George Washington University, believes the negative attitudes about aging get their start in childhood. Think of the fairy tales we read to our impressionable toddlers: they’re full of wicked witches, stepmothers who are ugly inside and out, old women who live in shoes and abuse their too-large broods.

The Center has compiled a list of stories for children of all ages that show older adults as kind, active, humorous, wise, creative, brave—all the rest of the admirable qualities we aspire to at any age.

That is, if we aren't aspiring only to looking good.

Seems we need to start at the beginning. Give a child you know a good book—and some real-life experiences with women (and men) who are older, but not worse for it.

This entry also is posted at Aging Maven.

3:30 pm: A reader wanted me to make clear that the photos came first (the Drudge Report) and Limbaugh's comments came in response to them. He also objected to my use of the word "screed," claiming Limbaugh's point was about society and not Clinton. I think everything that man says is screed, and I'm sticking to it. That doesn't mean that the observation of American attitudes about aging (especially aging women) isn't accurate: it is. At the same time, it's a Hillary slam.

Fifty two years ago today, Rosa Parks stayed seated on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the world changed.

Of course, it wasn’t that easy. And it wasn’t a random act. Parks, a seamstress, was active in the voter registration movement for who were then called Negroes. She’d attended a desegregation workshop as a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

“(There) I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society…I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people."

The bus event wasn’t planned, but you might say Parks was primed. Still, it was a signal moment in a struggle for human equality that goes on today.

I remember learning in school about this tired and dignified little old lady who had “spoken” truth to power against the wrong of segregation. Somehow, that image made her arrest more worthy of indignation. Nobody likes the idea of big scary police putting their hands on tiny little old ladies.

But today, I am reminded that Rosa Parks was 42 at the time. Martin Luther King Jr. was 26.

In 1955, 42-year-olds were not old but certainly were considered mature. And that was a good thing. There was work to do: families to raise, mortgages to pay off, business to be done, freedom to be won.

Parks went on to co-found with her husband the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development to help young people pursue education, register to vote and work toward racial peace.

In searching the Net for news about  women around Parks’ age at the time, I found Sarah Jessica Parker and Teri Hatcher. Google links led to “Older women having babies,” “Hottest women over 40,” “Fashion don’ts for women over 40,” “Older women and younger men.”

Pages and pages of diet, exercise, and skin care. Articles about women’s desire to be thinner, sleeker, hotter.

Nothing much about being grown up and taking responsibility for the world.

I don’t know what’s wrong with this picture.

Have I got your attention?

The State of Wisconsin Board on Aging and Long Term Care certainly got mine in today's press release titled "What? Sex in a Nursing Home???

A press release from the state with four question marks in the title is a rarity. Normally, state officials try to project an air of gravity and utter certainty. But you'd be crazy not to have a few questions here.

If Grandma and widower Emil down the hall decide to become lovers and don't bother the other residents, why not? Is it immoral? Illegal? Or does it depend?

There will be no jokes about Depends, please.

According to author James Richardson, the briefing reports, a person who isn't able to consent to major surgery because of impaired decision-making may well be able to make other decisions--like what flavor ice cream she may want. And "the ability to consent to sexual activity could be considered  to lie closer to the decision about ice cream than to the decision about major surgery."

If memory holds, I'm much more likely to consider sex as related to ice cream than to consider sex as related to major surgery. So I'm sold on the idea that I, and not my children or the night nurse, should get to decide who visits me and how I'll entertain them.

Kudos to the Long Term Care Ombudsman Program in supporting policies that give residents the right to seek sexual expression in a safe and appropriate manner.

Still, I can't help but think of an old joke.

Otto, the only male resident of HappyVale Senior Residence, has read about some little blue pills that will return some of his youthful functions. He sends off to Canada for a supply, tries one, and is delighted by the results.

He rushes into the dining hall shouting words he'd read on the advertising circular: "Super Sex! Super Sex? Who wants super sex?"

Mable and Inga turn to each other, reflect for a moment, and turn back.

"We'll take the soup," they reply in unison.