Notes from a nursing home: ‘Our books told of who we were. The story of us. Then the movers came and asked what should go’

Pencil marks in the margins of books gathered over a lifetime was proof of a life lived. So when it came time for Andrew McKean to move into aged care, leaving his books behind made the self thinner My wife, Patricia, and I came to our nursing home with little more than clothes, a few photographs and some books we could still carry. The shelves we left behind still stand in the emptied rooms of the house we called home for 30 years. Those shelves once groaned under the weight of books we had...

By Andrew McKean