About

Maggie Steber was an only child. Madje Steber was a single parent. They were all the family they had and it wasn’t easy.

Madje divorced when Maggie was only six months old. Strong and independent, Madje raised her daughter in the small Texas town of Electra, near the Oklahoma border. She had a keen awareness of what others might be thinking of a young single mother at a time when that was often viewed as a scarlet letter. Their tiny house had strict rules and a formality that rubbed Maggie the wrong way, especially during her teenage years. Their relationship was strained with arguments and threats to move out. At the age of twenty-one, Maggie finally did.

“I wanted to leave, I had to leave,” Maggie says. “I went to New York to find my fortune, and there I found it.”

That fortune was as an internationally acclaimed photojournalist. She covered everything from fashion to war and completed stories in 62 different countries. She worked routinely for National Geographic, was the Director of Photography for the Miami Herald and taught at various universities and workshops.

As the years passed and Madje grew older, her memory began to fade. Maggie tried to help, but her busy career kept her away from Texas. She was only was able to visit a few times year. To this day, Maggie wonders if she did enough for her aging mother. Eventually it became apparent, Madje had dementia.

The disease proved relentless and Madje could not live alone anymore. Maggie was faced with an issue that more and more Americans must deal with as the massive baby-boomer population grows older. Maggie moved her mother to Miami to care for her. “This is my last chance to do it right,” Maggie says.

Over the next few years, Maggie turned her professional eye on her own life, documenting Madje’s life in an assisted living facility. The images speak to the pain of loss, the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship and the fragility of life. They reveal beauty in a liberation from the roles Maggie and Madje had learned to play as mother and daughter. They speak to both the harsh and humorous realities of life with a diminished parent and contain lessons for all of us as we face these issues in our own lives.

“This body of work is the most important one I have ever done,” says Maggie, “and will ever do. It’s Madje’s story, but really and truly, it’s my story.”

ᔥ Mediastorm

Growing older and being overweight are not necessarily associated with a decrease in mental well-being, according to a cross-cultural study looking at quality of life and health status in the US and the UK.

The study, led by Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick, analysed lifestyle and health patterns in more than 10,000 people in both countries and their links to participants’ mental and physical quality of life and health status.

Quality of life was evaluated using a measure which takes in eight different factors including perception of general health, pain, social functioning and mental health.

The researchers found that people reported better mental quality of life as they age, despite a decrease in physical quality of life.

This is in line with previous research, for example by Professor Andrew Oswald, also at the University of Warwick, which suggests that happiness levels follow a U-shape curve with their lowest point in the mid-40s after which they rise as people move into older age.

Supportive results were found in this cross-cultural comparison study in the UK and US – two countries which have different welfare and health-care systems, factors which could impact on people’s quality of life. [continue reading…]

This week the National Highway Traffic Safety Board captured some headlines with their report on older drivers that offered more grim news: drivers over 65 are far more likely to die in crashes at intersections, and are far more likely to be involved in accidents in intersections. Even as overall rates of traffic fatalities decreased, those for older drivers increased. The solution? Better roads and safety precautions but basically nothing to be done about the deteriorating vision and reflexes of older drivers that contribute to this crashes.

Or can it? [continue reading…]