Want to be happy? Start thinking like an old person
I started following the lives of six New Yorkers over the age of 85. Visiting them is a lesson in living
Jonas Mekas turned 95 this year and won a lifetime achievement award in Frankfurt, Germany. Ping Wong, 92, learned new rules for playing mahjong. Helen Moses, who turned 93, mostly gave up talk of marrying Howie Zeimer, her steady companion of the last eight years. Ruth Willig, 94, broke a bone in her foot and feared it was the beginning of the end.
John Sorensen’s ashes wait to be scattered on New York’s Fire Island. Fred Jones would have turned 90 in March.
Nearly three years ago, I started following the lives of six New Yorkers over the age of 85, one of the fastestgrowing age groups in America. The series of articles began the way most stories about older people do, with the fears and hardships of aging: a fall in the kitchen, an aching leg that did not get better, days segueing into nights without human contact. They had lived through — and some were still challenged by — money problems, medical problems, the narrowing of life’s movements.
But as the series went along, a different story emerged. When the elders described their lives, they focused not on their declining abilities but on things that they could still do and that they found rewarding. As Wong said, “I try not to think about bad things. It’s not good for old people to complain.”
Here was another perspective on getting old. It was also a lesson for those who are not there yet.
Older people report higher levels of contentment or well-being than teenagers and young adults. The six elders put faces on this statistic. If they were not always gleeful, they were resilient and not paralyzed by the challenges that came their way. All had known loss and survived. None went to a job he did not like, coveted stuff she could not afford, brooded over a slight on the subway or lost sleep over events in the distant future. They set realistic goals. Only one said he was afraid to die.
Gerontologists call this the paradox of old age: that as people’s minds and bodies decline, instead of feeling worse about their lives, they feel better. In memory tests, they recall positive images better than negative; under functional magnetic resonance imaging, their brains respond more mildly to stressful images than the brains of younger people.
John Sorensen, who liked to talk, brought cheer to every conversation, even those about wanting to die. Helen Moses and Ping Wong knew exactly what they wanted: for Moses, it was her daughter and Zeimer; for Wong, it was mahjong and the camaraderie it entailed, even if the other players spoke a different dialect or followed the rules of a different home region. Jones, Willig and Mekas all spent their energy on the things they could still do that brought them satisfaction, not on what they had lost to age.
For three years, visiting them has been a lesson in living, and a rejoinder to the myth that youth is life’s glory, after which everything is downhill. Their muscles weakened, their sight grew dim, their friends and peers gradually disappeared. But each showed a matter-of-fact resilience that would shame most 25-yearolds.
“It’s like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel,” Jones said one day in his apartment, a cluttered walk-up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, whose stairs he could barely climb. “The span is too long just to have a bridge, so they had to have a bridge and an underpass. So part of it you’re up here, and part of it you’re down here, and finally you get to the Eastern Shore. Good days, bad days. But overall it’s good days.” So it went with all of them. Their message was so counterintuitive that it took a long time to sink in. But finally it did: If you want to be happy, learn to think like an old person.
For Ping Wong, who began the year in a nursing home near her daughter in southern New Jersey, 2017 was a year of making adjustments. She was in new surroundings, among new people, facing changes in both her body and her mind. After a fall in the nursing home, she had to use a wheelchair, and without exercise, her artificial hips became stiff and sore. Her memory lapses were more frequent, her daughter, Elaine Gin, said.
In one conversation Wong gave her age variously as 90, 92, 98 and almost 100. “I live a long life,” she said.
One night she called her daughter in a panic because she thought Japanese soldiers were going to kill her, a flashback from the occupation of Hong Kong during the Second World War.
But by her birthday in May, when three generations of relatives visited with a cake from Chinatown, Wong seemed alert and adapting to her new home. Like the others, she described her life through its continuities, not its disruptions.
“At the beginning, of course, I don’t like this place, but gradually I think it’s good for me to stay here because I meet a lot of honest friends,” she said.
Wong said it took almost a year to adjust to her new home. But by December she had formed a very close friendship with another resident, as well as several more casual friendships. She played mahjong and dominoes, and called out the numbers at bingo. It was a smaller life than she had in her apartment in New York, but it suited her energy level.
“I like the life here much better than young times,” she said in December.
“Young times we only have time to study and make money. I couldn’t remember when I was young, what
“I like the life here much better than young times. Young times we only have time to study and make money.” PING WONG 92-YEAR-OLD LIVING IN NEW JERSEY
we were interested in talking about. Nothing. Only today’s lunch or today’s outing. That’s all we were interested in when we were young.”
Now, she said, “We seldom talk about bad things. We keep ourselves happier. Try your best to keep your mood up. I’m getting old. I want to live a peaceful life here. No arguments, and we can talk with each other without any difficulties.”
Francesco Ragazzi had a theory about Jonas Mekas. “In a way,” he said one morning in October, “everybody now can be Jonas Mekas.”
Ragazzi, 33, an art curator from Milan, was in town to assemble an exhibition of Mekas’ work at a fashion boutique on Madison Avenue, and he was noting the resemblance between the diary-based films Mekas started making in the 1970s and the social media that followed decades later.
“But,” he said, “there is only one Jonas Mekas still. So I think we need to ask ourselves why. Because I think if everybody will be Jonas Mekas one day, the world will be saved. We need to keep going in this direction, becoming Jonas Mekas.”
Mekas this year made progress toward a goal that has driven him since the start of the series: raising money to expand An- thology Film Archives, the non-profit organization and theatre he helped start in the 1970s.
On March 2, a crowd that included Greta Gerwig, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters and others bid nearly $2 million (U.S.) at an art auction to benefit the archives. Performing onstage, Patti Smith altered the lyrics to her biggest hit to “Because the night belongs to JONAS,” to big applause.
For Mekas it was a year of reckoning: how much money the organization still needs to raise ($6 million); how far was too far to travel at age 95 (Seoul, where he did not attend an exhibition of his work); and how to make ends meet in the coming years.
This last was a trickier matter. He could no longer afford the rent on his Brooklyn loft, he said.
“I have to move to a cheaper place,” probably within a year, he said.
But Mekas put the disruption in perspective. His life has been nomadic since the 1940s, including years in Nazi labour camps and UN camps for displaced persons. Moving to a smaller place somewhere in Brooklyn was a hiccup.
“It’s a necessity and it’s realistic and I need to do it and you do it,” he said. “It’s nothing. This is just another stop, and there will be another stop.”
Mekas also published a book of anecdotes and autobiographical images this year, A Dance With Fred Astaire, named for a Yoko Ono and John Lennon movie in which Mekas and Astaire both make dancing cameos. Another five or six books were almost ready, and a couple of films still needed finishing. After that, he said, “I’d like to travel.”
For now, he said, “I’m thinking about resistance. What does it mean, resistance? What kind of resistance do we need today? Technology is now being used, much of it, for negative purposes.
“So to resist all what is happening negatively in humanity or technology is to develop the — OK, this banal word — spiritual aspect.”
He remained sanguine, despite some reservations about current world leaders. Totalitarianism, in his experience, did not endure, whereas art, nature and the teachings of the saints all were as powerful as ever — they were what composed his life. He did not use the word optimistic, but he felt that solutions were more durable than problems.
“To go back and introduce into all the schools art, to cut down on sports but bring arts, philosophy back into all educational systems,” he said. “And that’s what’s being cut everywhere. And I think that’s one of the sad and tragic parts of where we are. Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.”
So ends another year for four members of New York’s oldest old: not with a whimper, but with small joys to ease their aches. Each lost a little and moved a year closer to death, as we all did. But each welcomed another morning, the start of another year to come. All had beaten the odds just to get this far.
As Willig said, “You think we’ll make another year, you and me?” John Leland’s book based on his “85 and Up” series — Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons From a Year Among the Oldest Old — is now available.