Life Lessons, From Those Who Have Lived a Lot

Medical students have so much to learn about. For instance, the sex lives of 82-year- olds. That is where Elizabeth Shepherd comes in. She sat down with students at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York recently and told them about raising the son that she bore out of wedlock in 1964. She told them about being divorced twice, and about how she “emigrated to Lesbianland for a little while in my 50s.” She told them about later meeting a 90-year- old online and having “the most wonderful summer with this man.” And she told them about her current love interest, who is 65.

But “he’s in Afghanistan at the moment,” she said, “so my sex life is not as active as I’d like.”

That’s probably not what the students expected to hear from someone the age of their grandmothers. But such stories are the reason Weill Cornell has an anti-ageism program, called “Introduction to the Geriatric Patient.”

“If you’re only seeing the hospitalized elderly, you’re seeing the debilitated, the physically deteriorating, the demented,” said Dr. Ronald Adelman, who developed the program. “It’s easy to pick up ageist stereotypes.”

Ms. Shepherd surely shook up the students’ thinking. “It’s important that they don’t think life stops as you get older,” she told The Times. “So I decided I would be frank.”

The doctors-to-be could get another anti-ageism lesson if they drove an hour north and got a haircut. In the town of New Windsor, they could walk into Fantastic Cuts and wait for their turn in the chair of Anthony Mancinelli, who at 107 is the world’s oldest working barber. Yes, working. Five days a week, from noon to 8 p.m.

“I don’t let anyone else touch my hair,” said a regular, John O’Rourke. “The guy’s been cutting hair for a century.”

That is an exaggeration. Mr. Mancinelli has been cutting hair for only 96 years, starting when he was 11.

The medical students would have more need for his services than he would have for theirs. “I only go to the doctor because people tell me to, but even he can’t understand it,” Mr. Mancinelli told The Times. “I tell him I have no aches, no pains, no nothing.”

He never takes a sick day, said the shop’s owner, Jane Dinezza. “I have young people with knee and back problems, but he just keeps going,” she said. “He can do more haircuts than a 20-year- old kid.”

His secrets? He never smoked or drank heavily. He eats thin spaghetti “so I don’t get fat.” And he always puts in a satisfying day’s work.

“He’s just in the right state of mind,” Ms. Dinezza said.

It has taken Robert W. Goldfarb a long time to understand how important that is. At 88, Mr. Goldfarb remains a competitive runner.

“The finish line of my life is drawing close,” he wrote in The Times. “I’ve been training my body to meet the demands of this final stretch.” But he now believes that physical emphasis has been wrong.

“Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym,” he wrote. “Some of my healthiest friends carry themselves as victims abused by time. They see life as a parade of disappointments.”

But others, hobbled by physical wear and tear, “find comfort in their ability to accept old age as just another stage of life to deal with.”

So he is retraining, hoping to acquire a trait that he considers essential: contentment.