A Vancouver group connecting seniors and youth is throwing it back to the past by reviving a bygone practice: pen-palling.

Before reading this editorial, take a few seconds to return to the cover of this week’s issue. That tender scene of a senior in long-term care reaching out but not touching a loved one is happening daily across Canada.

For 10 of the 32 years Sr. Rosemarie Donovan lived in Nigeria, she lived in a poor rural village. She had a one-room house. She pumped her water from the well with the other women and cooked her meals over a fire. The stars in the night sky filled up the heavens.

A grim picture of Canadians dying amid the noise and bustle of hospital acute care wards, unable to access quality palliative care, emerges from the first-ever comprehensive, national assessment of palliative care by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

VANCOUVER – Hostelling International boasts some interesting locations for their nightly accommodations. World travellers booking with HI can spend a night in a cell at the Carleton County jail in Ottawa, in old army barracks on Jericho Beach, or inside the former Olympic Village in Whistler.

DENVER, Colo. – It was August in Rome, the dog days of summer, and most people had left the Eternal City for the beach or another summer holiday destination.

For many seniors, day-to-day living is a lonely and often isolating experience.

TORONTO – A seniors outreach pilot project is set to begin in select suburban Toronto parishes this year, funded in part through donations to the annual ShareLife campaign.

TORONTO – By 2030 a quarter of Canadians will be over the age of 65. Over the next 50 years the number of us over the age of 80 will more than triple to somewhere north of five million.

TORONTO - For almost 100 years in Toronto, thousands of Sunday worshippers have relied on Sunday only streetcar stops to help get them to church on time.