Pacific NW MAGAZINE DORIS CARNEVALI EWA

By 

Clay Eals

Special to The Seattle Times

IN HER YOUTHFUL eyes, smile and bearing, we can see it all — joy; hope; and, reinforced by a sturdy tree, boldness and fortitude.

That fits this December 1940 day. The 18-year-old poses in uniform outside the Swedish Hospital nurses’ home on First Hill, following a “capping” recognition ceremony in the second of her four years of study at Swedish’s School of Nursing.

She’s Doris Schölin Carnevali, a Seattle native and local legend, for an oft-honored nursing and educational career at Swedish and the University of Washington and for what she embraced six years ago after turning 95 … and continued through this year at 101. This accomplishment is an extraordinary blog of 200-plus entries, attracting 1,000 subscribers, with the rhyming title “Engaging With Aging.”

Her blog, suggested by a UW dean and set up by a granddaughter, covers all manner of the physical and emotional aspects of getting older. With a first-person voice, it’s less a compendium of explicit advice than a set of lessons by example, from adjusting to changed abilities to accepting offered assistance.

Mixing anecdotes and philosophy, the longtime West Seattleite imparts wisdom and humor from which we all can benefit, if (as the saying goes) we are lucky to live so long.

A sample: “No way did I think that becoming aged would require almost constant creativity in order to remain happy and satisfied, but it has! Now this creativity has little to do with the way I would have defined it in the past: artistic, inventive, theoretical. No; instead it’s been mundane, pragmatic, primitive, tiny, adaptive.” Thus, in her kitchen: “The round knob on the oven … was too stiff for me to turn. A quarter-inch-wide small rubber band over its circumference gives me the traction I need. I can still bake!”