This just in…. forget what the AARP and the Harvard Health Newsletter tell you. Forget doing crossword puzzles or learning a foreign language. Instead, keep doing what you’ve always done.
I learned this from my neighbor and friend, Marge. She’s 101½ and lives alone.
How does she manage? “I keep breathing.”
But it’s more than that. Marge also continues to do what she’s done since her second husband died almost forty years ago: she manage her own life.
When her housekeeper calls in sick, Marge changes her own sheets. When she needs cash for tips and miscellaneous expenses, she goes to the bank herself. When a guest visits and offers to get the door for her, she politely tells them, “Sit. I can do it.”
Research bears out her approach: House cleaning keep seniors up and moving. Studies on aging brains, as reported in a 2019 NPR review, concluded that “daily movement — even household chores — may boost brain health.” Conversely, those who move to “assisted” living and no longer “do” for themselves sometimes begin to languish without daily purpose.
Marge won’t let that happen. She is fiercely, robustly, and admiringly independent. She takes care of herself and speaks for herself. She’ll ask for help…if she needs it.
She is careful — she walks with a cane or rollator — but she also works out with a personal trainer twice a week. She’s a regular at Wolfgang’s, where she lunches on oysters and filet mignon. On the way home, she stops at Duane Reade and picks up a few bags of Dove dark chocolate (“I’ve always been a chocoholic!”).
Like many of my old ladies, Marge never thought she’d be “this old.” She can’t believe she’s 101½, a number that doesn’t fit:
“I see through 25-year-old eyes, and my body feels 110!”
Marge forges ahead anyway, determined to keep doing what she’s always done. She still walks the city she loves, albeit for shorter distances. When wet or icy pavement makes it too risky to brave the streets, she walks our carpeted hallways.
Lately, Marge has allowed my new puppy (too young to go outside) to accompany her. She maintains a steady, determined pace and smiles as Rocky scampers ahead of her. Eight times, back and forth, with her rollator, she points out, “is the equivalent of four city blocks.”
I ask how she figured that out. “It’s easy,” says the centenarian with a steel-trap mind. “Our building is half a block long.” (I never noticed; I store this fact for future reference.)
I feel blessed to spend time with Marge. She allows me to see that it’s possible to be joyfully and responsibly engaged with life despite “oldest old age” (over 95). Refusing to let any number define her, she…
cooks for herself,
calls her doctor about the elevated levels of potassium on her last blood test,
washes her own hair,
contacts Bloomingdale’s because it’s time to have the living room sofa and chairs cleaned,
orders from D’Agostino so she’s “set for the week,”
reads The New York Times every day and Barron’s weekly (giving up the Wall Street Journal when it no longer published “the numbers”),
orders gourmet take-out from her favorite neighborhood restaurants,
writes checks to charities that feed people and take care of New Yorkers,
goes through her mail and cleans up miscellaneous papers piled on her desk (“It’s mostly junk”),
manages her own stock portfolio, continues to invest. (Until recently, she handled her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s trusts as well.)
To Marge, routine, everyday tasks — annoying chores that many of us dread — are life-affirming. They tell her she’s still independent, still in the game. As she nears 102, she not only keeps breathing, she continues to plan ahead.
Where do I sign up?