The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Seniors set a very busy pace
Octogenarians share how they stay active and engaged.
In good weather, Sylvia Lask logs thousands of steps a day on her Fitbit as she pushes down New York City sidewalks with her walker. As frequently as once a week, she heads to Albany, walker and all, to lobby state government officials about mentalhealth issues.
Florence Lee drives in to Manhattan on her own from Queens on Thursday nights during the New York Philharmonic’s season for performances of the vaunted orchestra. Larry White still travels around New York State, as he has for the past 10 years, to help prison inmates manage long sentences.
What makes Lask, Lee and White particularly notable is that all of them have found a way to forge active lives past 81, the average life expectancy for someone living in New York City. And because of that, they are featured in a series of narratives, photos and videos showing “that older people have goals, they have lives that are dynamic,” says Dorian Block, director of the Exceeding Expectations project at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University. “You can be the person you’ve always been.”
Through social workers, friends of friends and neighbors, the center tracked down 20 older New Yorkers living active lives — a mixture of rich, poor, black, white, Hispanic, Asian — and followed them through their daily routines from 2015 to 2017.
New York City is a unique place to live and age. The city that never sleeps has a wealth of aspects that eases life for the elderly: Food delivery, micro neighborhoods, endless cultural entertainment, an abundance of senior centers and parks, and easily accessible medical care. And there’s no need to drive: The city is connected by a vast transportation system, so that even those who might not be able to manage stairs to the subway can take the bus or use the Access-A-Ride service for disabled passengers. In addition, taxis and taxi alternatives such as Lyft and Uber are plentiful.
Even with its focus on New York, the Columbia project has provided lessons about aging that apply to anyone. Among them:
1. Have a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning. Take the example of Lask, who is 84. “If you do nothing, you’re going to sit and rock, and your life has no meaning after that,” says Lask,
who still works part time as a psychiatric counselor at a mental-health clinic in the Bronx. “It doesn’t mean because you’ve reached a certain age that you have to stop!”
2. Celebrate and cultivate the social connections. Sandy and Art Robbins, 83 and 89, live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in an apartment that serves as headquarters for her theater company, rooms for her husband’s art therapy clients, and the location of many a Passover dinner for members of their extended family.
Lee, 83, a retired teacher who moved to Queens about 14 years ago after living for many years farther east on Long Island, plans to stay put in the city. “I’ll never move” to a seniors-only community with “no young voices, no people going to work,” she says.
Aurea Texidor, 88, has such a network of friends at her local senior center that she has accumulated a collection of hats these friends have knitted for her.
3. Do not be defined by your obstacles. Jacquie Murdock, 87, a former professional dancer, is blind and was recently given a cancer diagnosis. But she’s such a fashionista that she was profiled by a popular blog, Advanced Style, which celebrates fashion for older people, and she is sometimes recognized on the street because of that. Until her illness slowed her down, she regularly took the subway around the city and participated in dance classes for senior citizens.
“Some people live with health and other challenges as the main plot of their lives,” says Columbia’s Block. “For so many other people, it’s just the background.”
4. Money isn’t as important as you might think. Block says the New Yorkers who had the basics of a safe roof over their heads and enough to eat seemed content with their lives, even though some of them are barely scraping by.
“Something that was very surprising to me was that people’s levels of satisfaction with their life and their daily routines were not affected by their class and income level,” he says. Some of the people in the project who had the least income had some of the richest views of life. For instance, Rosa Mendoza, 88, a Cuban immigrant who gets by on her $1,200 monthly income from Social Security — while paying a rent of $800 — treats herself to ice cream when she has a little extra.
5. Acknowledge that aging can be lonely. Most of the participants had lost old friends and relatives, Block says, and tell her, “I don’t have peers anymore.” Many “felt very alone in their experience of aging,” she said.
Larry White, an 83-year-old resident of Harlem who spent 32 years in prison, says the men who had served time with him and remained his friends are now gone. With no living relatives, he describes himself as a loner.
6. Have a routine. Lee says that in addition to her Thursdays at the Philharmonic, she sets aside Tuesdays for doctor visits, Wednesdays for her hairdresser in her former hometown about 50 miles out on Long Island, and Fridays for yoga. Block says that most of the participants are
could not, at least in the near term, feel separate from his father and still go out jogging with him.
In short, adults can find themselves in a season of parenting when nothing they do sits right with their teenagers.
While we wait for this season to pass, what should we do when our teenager can hardly stand how we operate our turn signals?
For starters, we might view it as a reassuring marker of normal development. While we know, intuitively, that our children will not always admire and enjoy us the way they often do when they are young, it’s easier to part with our pedestals when we remember that our adolescents’ new allergies herald the next chapter in our relationships with them.
From there, we can either ignore their annoyance or remind our children that they are free to be aggravated, but not rude. If necessary, we can gently point out that it won’t be long before they’ll be driving and operating the turn signals just as they please.
Finally, we can sometimes welcome teenage self-consciousness as an opportunity to connect. When I was growing up and a friend of mine’s allergy to his parents was at its absolute height, his mother would allow him to choose her outfit when they needed to attend school events together. Of course the case can be made against indulging adolescent hypersensitivities. But the case can also be made that eighthgrade orientation is already stressful enough. If wearing one sweater rather than another makes little difference to you, why not do what you can to ease your tween’s mind?
As for my colleague, he dearly missed going on runs with his son, just as many parents of adolescents long for the days when their preteen laughed at their jokes and happily came along on errands. We are rarely as ready to separate from our teenagers as they are ready to separate from us.
Even when you don’t take your child’s secession from your union personally, it still hurts. Having other interests and supportive relationships can help. Go out for coffee with friends whose teenagers also look at them askance and reassure your wife that she’s still got it, even if her dance moves do cause your ninthgrade daughter to break out in hives.
For teenagers whose allergies manifest as persistent disrespect, laying down some ground rules can help. A wise friend of mine tells her adolescent son that he can be friendly, polite or clear about needing some time alone; insolence, however, is off the table. And though it’s painful to be treated as an irritant, holding a grudge can sour those unexpected moments when even the most reactive teenager welcomes our company.
Once teenagers have had time and space to establish their own skills, interests and tastes, their allergic response to their parents usually dies down. Plus, neurological development is on our side. As they age, adolescents’ evolving cognitive capacities allow them to think beyond seeing their parents only as being like, or unlike, how they themselves want to be.
Now they can sort what they see in us into categories that could not exist before. We can have bothersome quirks that our teenagers view as entirely our own; we can have characteristics they admire, but don’t care to cultivate. And our teenagers can embrace interests that they happen to share with us.
Teenagers’ allergies to their parents may make a brief return at moments when they want tight control of their personal brands — such as during college visits, or when highly regarded peers are nearby. But at some point you may be able to return to blowing goodbye kisses without causing your teenager anything more than mild discomfort. And your dance moves might even get a little long overdue respect, too.