Finding Our Role Models for Living Long and Well

By Elizabeth Meade Howard

I began writing my book, Aging Famously, without knowing it. I realize now that it was a mourning project, a way to honor my father’s memory as well as to process his death. My mother had died 20 years earlier.

When she died at 72, my father – a former New York ad man, writer and gentle teacher – said it felt like “a black hole in space.” Her death left him alone in the house they’d designed together. At first he said, “It’s your mother’s house. I            don’t feel I should move a thing.” But in time — favored with good health and   the affection of family, friends and even lovers — he found ways to comfortably rearrange the house and to move forward. He adapted to his losses, and although he had no apparent master plan for successful aging, his instinctive solutions served him well. He was my hero and a role model with sensible steps to follow. He would live to 90, setting me a worthy example through the years.

In my early 60s when abruptly elevated to family elder, I considered my father’s tactics and how best to face my last decades. As a journalist, I sought the company and wisdom of the experts – men and women a decade or so ahead whom I admired for their creativity and continued engagement in their passionate pursuits. These older mentors and role models were curious, optimistic and natural risk takers. Some were famous.

Over the years, I found elders whom I admired, observing and learning how they overcame their losses and continued to contribute their talents and time to what mattered most to them. They shared their stories and instruction for living long and well. I met resilient and persevering elders in my hometown of Charlottesville Virginia, my childhood home, New York City, and on winter visits to Key West, Florida.

I started right next door. Artist Hartwell Wyse Priest at 77 lost her husband to pneumonia, and four years later, her gentle, grown daughter to breast cancer. She turned to her painting of ancient rocks and trees to sustain her. She found solace painting and making prints of the pre-Cambrian rocks and weathered pines and birches on her summer island in Canada’s Georgian Bay. I visited Hartwell there; she rose at dawn and took her palette into the woods to paint every day. At 100, she prepared for a one-woman show. “After Marianna and A.J. died, I worked more intensely than ever,” said Hartwell. “Making prints is a natural escape into a creative activity that I needed. It is good to escape to the work. A part of me was waiting to be developed until I got over the shock and the grief.” Hartwell lived to 103.

I next found Rebecca McGinness, a 105-year-old African-American former teacher at Charlottesville’s Jefferson School. While initially drawn to Mrs. McGinness because of her age, I soon learned she was most remarkable as someone still contributing to her community – still acting as respected “mother” of her church, still teaching those younger about their past, the importance of dignity and resistance to injustice. She lived to 107.

As opportunity knocked, I broadened my interviews. In New York, I met Jean Bach, a former radio producer, who when widowed at 71, turned her talents to making her first film – a documentary about the jazz greats. Her film was nominated for a 1995 Academy Award. “I guess the film was an extension of learning a new skill and new stuff about these great people, most of whom I’d known for a good bit of my life: Sahib Shihab. Blakey, Freeman, Count Basie, Max Kaminsky, Dizzy,” said Jean. “So many have died since the film was made…In the film Sonny Rollins says, ‘What’s the point of living to be 100 if you don’t accomplish something?’ I gave it a lot of thought.” And action. Jean lived to 94.

Famed broadcaster Walter Cronkite stepped away from his CBS anchor chair at the mandatory retirement age of 65. He admitted to feeling adrift, uncertain at first where to focus his still considerable energy and concerns. When we met at CBS in 2003, he’d elected to press on, to keep writing his less than objective opinions, to keep seeking and learning. “I feel I’m open to new ideas. I’m curious about everything,” he said. “I don’t read a piece in the paper that doesn’t make me want to know more.” He’d even asked his doctors to rig up a mirror so he could witness his own appendectomy. Cronkite counseled me, “Stay curious. Try to beat back the infirmities. Try to avoid sinking into inactivity and disinterest in the world around you.” He lived to 94.

Actor Hal Holbrook, 90 and determined not to retire, still takes his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” on the road. After resting three months from his last national tour, Hal was raring to return. “Being home was OK for a month or so, but it’s driving me crazy,” he said. “Get on the damn road and wear yourself out and see if you can still make it. Forget the 90 years old and all that crap and keep going.”

I interviewed actress/comedienne Carol Channing after her solo show, The First 80 Years are the Hardest, at the Feinstein Room at New York’s Regency Hotel. By then Carol was 83 and blissfully reunited with her teenage first love, Harry Kullijian. They married in 2003 soon after rediscovering their lingering affections needed only the slightest strike of the match.

The dinner audience clapped and called for the old standards. Carol pretended amazement; her dark eyes saucered: “You remember!?” We remembered and clapped for more. Carol delivered a still sexy “Razzle Dazzle” with rhinestones sparkling on her toes. She finished with Dolly Levi’s rousing ballad, “Before The Parade Passes By:”

With the rest of them, with the best of them

I can hold my head up high

For I’ve got a goal again, I’ve got a drive again

I wanna feel my heart coming alive again

Before the parade passes by.

(Words and Music by Jerry Herman)

Carol sang an encore to what was perhaps her personal battle hymn, and invited Harry to her side. He took her hand, Carol’s willing partner as they soft-shoed into the spotlight. They ended in step with a gentle kiss. Carol, now 97, certainly deserves an extra curtain call.

In writing my role models’ stories, I realized how they had turned sorrow into healing, loss into new resolve and purpose, a mission or community concern. They, upheld by their beliefs and loving relationships, were enriched by gratitude and convictions. Each knew heartache, fear and struggle and yet persevered with desire and undeniable valor, the virtue I would come to understand was so crucial to the very end.

If some felt fame hard to relinquish, all were ambitious, determined to challenge their losses and to stay engaged in their last decades. They didn’t age passively. They learned how to do more with less. They were keenly aware of time’s passage and their own infirmities, yet they were reconciled to their ills and kept growing. Their resilience, rather than trapping them in loss, was grounded in acceptance and what was still left to them. They planned and made the most of their later lives, all the while sharing their stories, experiences and examples.

They gave me companionship, showing what it takes to live long and well, one willing step at a time. They gave me a chance to walk in their shoes. I offer their stories to readers who have also worried and wondered about old age and dying, and desire the counsel of wise elders. I urge you too to look, near and far, for your own essential and encouraging role models.

For more about Elizabeth Meade Howard’s work, click on her byline above.