Live Long and Prosper, How to Add Years to Your Life

In that foggy state between the time I crawled out of bed in the morning and I lay there with my brain still half asleep, I wrote an entire blog post in my head. It was cleaver and thought provoking and I woke up excited that I had something valuable to share. Then I made the mistake of thinking I’d remember the topic long enough to put the coffee pot on but as I scooped the grounds into the basket the fogginess in my head lifted and the entire thing went with it. So here I am sitting at the computer trying to conjure it back by over-stirring my coffee as if I were a witch hovering over a vat of boiling brew of black magic. 

I love that half asleep, half awake state of mind. The colors are brighter. The actions are faster. The storylines are epic and more than once I’ve woke up thinking that Steven Spielberg and Stephen King have figured out a way to channel this state of their minds into fiction for the ages. If I'm ever stuck in that place between awake and sleep and my heirs are debating whether or not to pull the plug, I hope there's a way of letting them know if I am stuck in a Stephen King-like nightmare or if am in outer space on an adventure with Spielberg’s E.T. Let me just say it now, in case that happens, I have very few nightmares. My dreamscapes are more likely about the adult versions of chasing rainbows and puppy dog tails.

They had a Ted Talk lecture here on campus last week titled How to Live to a Hundred. You’d be surprised---or maybe you wouldn’t---at how many people said they weren’t going to it because they have no interest in living that long. If you took these people seriously there would be an opening for a sharp shooter on campus to pick off the ones who say, “Just shoot me if it’s time to move me to assisted living or memory care.” We could build a sharp shooter's nest in a tree along the path leading towards those buildings and paint a big X on the chests of those who don't want to go.

Up until I moved here I used to say it all the time that I want to live to be a hundred. I still do but I don’t say it out loud anymore because other residents would ask "Why?" with distaste and disdain in their voices. And I don’t have a good answer other than I've been saying it so long I can't take it back. My mom had three great-aunts who lived to be over 100 and that made them famous in their small home town and in our family genealogy. I’m pathetic, aren’t I, competing with dead people in my family tree. Of course, in my mind I envision me being as full of life and as interested in the world around me as The Aunts were. They ran an antique store and printing business until nearly the end of their lives. I used to wonder what it would take to be a bride and worry about three elderly women living long enough to get my invitations printed.

At the lecture we learned that there are seven places in the world (Blue Zones) where longevity is the norm and I don’t live in one of them and I doubt anyone reading this does either. Most of us don’t walk everywhere or graze instead of eating three times a day. Drinking wine every day---some people here do that very well but living on nuts, grains, berries and other plant based foods, not so much. Heck, they don’t even serve a heart healthy diet around here. It’s like they want to give us all diabetes and heart disease, knock us off so they can resell our apartments. 

But living to be 100 has more to do with our genes and our location that anything else. We can’t control those things but one factor we can control that is common to all seven places in the world where longevity is norm is to have a tribe of people around us, five to six close friends and family to socialize with daily.

Here’s a summary of the ‘Ted Talk’ given by Dan Buettner, a National Geographics Writer and Explorer: 

1) Eat less: eat a low-calorie, mostly vegetarian (and in some cases vegan) diet, eating more in the morning and less at night

2) Keep moving: intentionally build physical activity into everyday life, including walking in nature and gardening

3) Rest and slow down: make time to de-stress, relax, and nap 

4) Loved ones first: include and celebrate family

5) Maintain connections: have a network of friends who reduce loneliness and act as a positive influence 

6) Have a sense of purpose: know your "ikigai" – your reason for being alive and getting up in the morning 

That sixth one on the list gets me every time. I struggle with finding my sense of purpose since I moved to this community fourteen months ago. You'd think by eighty years old I'd have a better sense of who I want to be when I grow up, wouldn't you. I'm so busy cultivating the fifth thing on the list---building connections---that I'm doing very little else. It's a fun way to live but in the middle of the night when I can't fall back to sleep I have this hollowness inside me that feels like I'm just marking time until I die. ©

Summary points are from Make Life Fun  

The Personal Property Distribution Document

Do you ever get obsessed over things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of life? My latest obsession has been to figure out what the tiny orange light is for on my laptop’s touchpad. It would have been an easy quest for information if I had remembered what that area on my keyboard is called. I don’t use the touchpad because I’ve added the dong so I can use an external mouse. So first I tried to google keyboard schematics to find one that labeled the various keyboard areas, but in order to do that I had to figure out how to spell ‘schematics’ and Alexa was having a PMS day and wouldn't help out my dyslexic brain. Finally, I figured out that googling ‘laptop configurations’ would get me the word I was looking for and from there I learned that I’m not the only person who got obsessed over why the tiny orange light appeared out of no where to drive us all nuts. I was in a large club and some techies took great delight in explaining that sometime in our tiptoeing around the keyboards we must had accidentally tapped twice on the upper left corner of the touchpad to turn the silly little light on and to turn it off we had to tap it twice again. That’s twenty minutes of my life I won’t get back.

I allowed myself to get distracted from what I actually sat down at my computer to do because I have been putting off creating the document I’ve needed to write for over month now. Remember back when I had a Trust drawn up? Everything that had to be done regarding my estate planning book has been done except for a ‘Personal Property Distribution’ sheet of things I want to go to whoever like jewelry, art, family artifacts and my car. You should see the Personal Property Distribution document I had the last time I did my estate planning back after my husband died and before I did a major downsizing to move to this continuum care complex.  It was three pages long and most of that stuff I sold or gave away in recent years. Now, I’m down to twenty-five items on my draft and they’d all fit in a average size suitcase except for my car which may or may not get sold long before I die if my ability to drive safety goes first. 

If you followed my blog during the epic downsizing project that literally took me two years you’ll know my husband and I were materialistic by nature. Don had a T-shirt once that said, “The one who dies with the most toys wins” and, boy, did he try to win that contest. His favorite thing to do on a Saturday morning was to get up before dawn and get to the flea market while the sellers were still unpacking their goods. His family had lost most of their worldly possessions in two tornadoes that hit their farm ten years a part and and I think he was trying to buy back his childhood. He never passed up a collectible toy, hand tool or advertising piece made before 1950. And Barbie Dolls. In his lifetime he undressed more Barbie Dolls at flea markets and garage sales than a whole gaggle of little girls could do in their dreams. He never did find the elusive 1959 Barbie worth today around $8,000 to $10,000 but he did find 6 or 7 that we resold for $100 each which was good price back in the last century when we were buying and selling antiques. Don had the ability to read a book on a certain type of collectible and remember the key dates and the markings to look for.

Now, I look at my list of twenty-five items and think, “What does it really matter what happens to, say, a trench lighter from WWI that my dad had acquired? The youngest members of my family didn’t know my dad and as far as I know none of the middle aged one are into wartime history or collectibles or collecting Tobacciana even if that lighter does looks does like a Rube Goldberg contraption. What do you do as elderly person trying to find homes for stuff? Do you try to explain what something old and useless is and why you like it? Do your best to make them like it too, or do you sell it to stranger who doesn’t have to be talked into anything? Or do you keep it until someone hauls your stuff off to Goodwill where a collector like Don likes to shop to find their hidden-in-plain-sight treasures?

I’m seriously thinking of making a twenty-five page picture book of my favorite old things with their histories included. I know exactly where this longing to keep generations connected to family objects comes from. I didn’t have grandparents growing up but my best friend since kindergarten had two sets, one living within walking distant and her grandparents all told such wonderful stories about all their treasured antiques brought over from the old country. I was still in my teens when I started buying antiques and they spoke to me as clearly as the elderly people in my friend’s family. I could imagine, for example, all the places an old whale oil lamp had traveled before it landed in my hands. My old lamps are still some of my favorite possessions and young people don’t even recognize them as a lighting source today. 

The bottom line is that when I downsized I was happy to sell and give stuff away to people I thought really appreciate the stuff I had. For example, one time we went to an estate sale and many of the things the old man had, had notes attached that gave the history of those pieces. I bought the first pair old long pants the guy had as a child in 1902---a beautifully tailored, tiny wool pair of nickers---and I left his note in the pocket with one of my own when I sold those pants on e-Bay in 2020. The woman who got them was thrilled with the notes and said when she was ready to part with them she’d add her own note. If I were King that’s what would happen to all the interesting objects in the world. They would come with pedigrees. ©

* The pants at the top are actually nickers---knee length---that the old man had labeled "my first pair of long pants." Note the tailored hole in the crotch for little boys to use when they needed to pee. 

Trench lighter were flameless and were used during WW1 so the enemy couldn't see where the soldiers were hiding in dug-out trenches.

 

The Dementia Diagnosis

One of my frequent dinner partners here at the continuum care campus is an 80 year old I nicknamed Ms. Social Worker who you may or may not remember had a series of falls a few months ago that, rumor had it, was due to a misuse of an opium-based pain medication. After her seventh fall, a long hospital stay and the addition of a walker in her life, she’s no longer falling but at dinner last night she told me she finally has a diagnosis of what’s going on with her: Dementia. She said a scan of her brain showed “masses of white spots, more than most people have at her age” and that she's been noticing symptoms for six months.

What do you say to someone who tells you that and then starts talking about going to a state where they have assisted suicide? “I wouldn’t mind dying of cancer, a stroke or a heart attack," she said, “but I don’t want to die of dementia.” I asked her if the doctor talked to her about medications that can slow down the progress of dementia---I know they have a few because my dad was in a trial for Aricept that was eventually brought to market and there have been newer ones developed since then. She said he didn’t but she has another appointment with a neurologist and her daughter is flying in to go with her. I told her to try not to panic or do anything rash because she’s probably got a few years before she wouldn’t be able to manage on her own. Knowledge is power, I told her. She’s still got time to build some good memories with her family. I didn't tell her I'm against legalized assisted suicide. (Ya, I know from past posts that some of you reading this take the opposite side. No need to debate this issue here again.)

When she was hospitalized her kids came to her apartment and took all the drugs out that they didn’t want her taking anymore including prescription sleeping pills and the opium based pain pills and thank goodness for that because the way she was talking at dinner I’d be worried she’d engineer her own death before Christmas. I don’t suppose any of us knows how we’d react to learning we had dementia but I’m pretty sure my first priority would not be how can I off myself. I’d hope I’d still remember the pleating words of Dylan Thomas to his dying father----

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That said, I’ve been going to the dementia education group meetings here on campus since my brother moved into the Memory Care building. Last week a new-on-campus couple attended and the woman has dementia and it turned into a support group more than a lecture. The guy in the couple did a lot of talking and as he shared his history of dealing with his wife’s prognosis I recognized myself in his almost manic wanting to do everything possible to hold on to his old wife, going from one kind of therapy to another. He talked so much FOR HER that the Director of Dementia Programs at one point asked her specifically how she felt about having dementia. It took her forever to form her words while the director gave non-verbal ques to her husband not to speak. Finally she answered that she felt like she was just waiting to die, that nothing mattered anymore.

The couple reminded me of a come-to-Jesus moment I had with my husband around 5-6 years our from his stroke that left him right side paralyzed and with a 25 word vocabulary. I had spent those years fighting to get him into every physical and speech therapy I could including swimming pool work but nothing really brought improvements in him. So I asked him if he wanted to stop therapies and he did. We got off the merry-go-round after that and just tried to live as normal of a life as we could.

The director said to the woman, “We have a support group just for you---no spouses or kids allowed---where you can talk with others going through the same thing. I think it would help you.” All the time the director was taking to her she looked directly at the woman, never gave her husband a glance. Leading up to this one-on-one exchange it was easy to see that the husband was so used to speaking for her that she had penned up frustration. I remembered that look in my husband’s eyes. With his speech issues he was frustrated a lot. At the dementia lecture before this one they highlighted how important it is to look dementia patients in the eye so now I have two people to practice that strategy on when we talk---Ms. Social Worker and my brother. This is not something that is normally in my wheelhouse.

Since my brother moved into the next building where Memory Care patients live, people here in independent living have asked me about what it’s like over there. And I tell them honestly that visiting the place takes the fear out of the possibility that I might have to move there someday, that I see compassionate caregivers and an attempt to offer the residents stimulating activities---they even took them downtown to the museum last week to see a Walt Disney exhibit last week and this week our bus is taking them to sculpture garden to see Christmas trees from around the world! 

I see other things, too, like a woman who picks up objects in one person’s room and leaves them off in other resident’s rooms and how little real privacy they have over there. But I don't tell the people living here in Independent those kinds of things because at our ages most of us already know what goes on behind the public face of places that house dementia and Alzheimer's patients. The fear of dementia is, in part, based on its ability to rob us of our dignity and if a little sugarcoating helps lessen that fear then call me a confectioner.  ©