NEVER TOO LATE TO START
Headline-making octogenarians are an inspiration to us all
I had planned to write this month about reverse mortgages until I became smitten by the story of Ellis Craig, an 83-yearold resident of a Perth, Ont., retirement home. One day he realized Canada had not had a good singalong patriotic song since Bobby Gimby's Ca-na-da in our centennial year. That's other than, of course, O Canada, the words of which have been changed it seems for “politically correct” reasons since I first learned it in 1952. (In Holland, the country of my birth, the words of the national anthem haven't changed since it was written more than three centuries ago.)
Although he had never before done anything like it, this motivated Mr. Craig to write We Are Canadian. You can listen to it being sung by Googling these three words. It was rated “over the top” by some and “pretty darn good” by Anne Murray (now herself age 75).
This prompted me to look for other good-news stories about 80-year-olds. Following is a selection from a brief internet search.
■ “80-year-old woman creates website for seniors battling depression” — Evelyn Burns-weinrib wanted to “provide them with resources how to deal with it.” (Somewhere I saw that depression interferes with new neuron production in the brain — see below.)
■ “An 80-year-old man with memory loss” — Mr. J is a retired teacher who has noticed memory loss for seven years. But he still lives in his own home and is the principal caregiver for his wife, who has a chronic debilitating illness and cannot walk (although he does benefit from their three adult children, who live nearby, being very supportive).
■ “Why most people are happier in their 80s” — Katharine Esty is an 86-year-old psychologist, widow, mother of four and grandmother of 10. She “fell into a funk” when about to turn 80, so she decided to interview people in their 80s to see what life was like for them. To her surprise, she found that “most people don't know that the aging brain is kinder than a younger brain, so many of them are happier than others.” In 2019, she published an article on the Salon website titled I Interviewed People in Their 80s About How They Cope with Aging. She found, among other things, that while most have health issues (a whopping 52 per cent have four or more chronic conditions), a sizable group has no serious ones. She also wrote a book titled Eighty Somethings: A Practical Guide to Letting Go, Aging Well, and Finding Unexpected Happiness.
■ “80-year-old singer STUNS judges around the world” — When Jamie Cutler auditioned for Britain's Got Talent in 2010, her rendition of No Regrets left the judges speechless.
■ “Meet the 80-year-old who still drives his Ferrari” — A friend of mine recently saw a gentleman emerging from the driver's side of a car. He recognized the driver a someone who had piloted a Wooden Wonder Mosquito bomber in the Second World
War. This now 96-year-old had his driver's licence taken away, but kicked up such a fuss he was made to take the test and, when he passed it, had it renewed. (In the U.S., drivers in the 60-to-69 age cohort have a lower car crash rate than any age group in the 16-to-59-year range. Of those aged 70 to 79, the rate is lower than that of those aged 30 to 59.)
■ “38 genius habits your 80-yearold brain will thank you for doing today” — This is from a book titled Outsmarting Alzheimer's by Kenneth S. Kosik of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For many years, the prevailing theory was that the brain cannot generate new cells and that making decisions, no matter how tiny, keeps neurons in the brain functional that otherwise might have gone to sleep forever, and that thus, as one gets old, habit becomes an enemy. So I have for years tried to make many small decisions daily, such as saying hello to strangers on the street, how to walk from point A to point B, with what hand to pick up a cup or open a door, and when or what to eat. And while today's academic crowd generally rejects the idea of finite brain cells, I intend to keep doing so, since it seems to work for me.
■ “Super Agers: Insights in the brains of 80+-year-old memory superstars” — A study by Emily Rogalski, a psychiatry professor at the Northwestern University School of Medicine, identified a group of people 80 years old and older who did as well as, or better, in episodic memory tests than healthy individuals who were 20 or 30 years younger.
■ “80-year-old woman shoots a buck from her kitchen as she's making lunch.”
■ “Peter Webster: 80-year-old footballer prepares to retire” — A resident of Wollongong, Australia, he felt he didn't contribute to matches as much as he used to. So he decided to retire as both a player and the groundsman for the Wollongong Figtree Football Club, saying, “In my first few years of playing, you wake up on Sunday all bruised and it's all gone by Monday. Now it's Monday before I feel bruises and the following Saturday until they're gone.”
■ “Ila Bossons, 83: Former Toronto councillor remained a persuasive, progressive force” — A Metro and Toronto city councillor from 1988 to 2000, she died on Nov. 30 after she had a stroke while composing a letter to the editor in response to a newspaper article about the RCMP opposing a Trudeau government plan to outlaw certain semi-automatic rifles.
■ “An 83-year-old great-grandpa's Christmas song finally made it on the radio” — Christmas is Here had been composed by the now 83-year-old Johnny Gonde-sen for his children in 1965.
■ “These two seniors ... just dropped their first album” — Marvin Weisbord (88) and
Alan Tripp (102), both residents of a retirement community in Pennsylvania, a year ago self-funded and released an album, their first ever, titled the Senior Song Book — Music like the 1940s, Words for the 2020s. One song features the lyrics “I know I ought to kiss you. But baby there's an issue. I just can't remember your name.”
The common thread in all these stories seems to be that the less one fusses about the limitations of aging and the more one focuses on doing something positive, the better one's quality of life.
And don't forget, by 2036 the number of centenarians — i.e. today's octogenarian survivors — is expected to triple!