Leland - Happiness is a choice you make: lessons from a year among the oldest old

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For Mom, maker of swans, with love and gratitude

Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.

David Bowie

Get me a gin!

Do you know what you want to do when you get old?

After a year of answering questions, John Sorensen asked one of his own. We were in the kitchen of his apartment on Manhattans Upper West Side, where he had lived for forty-eight years, the last six of them alone, since the death of his longtime partner. Around him was a mural of trees he had painted years earlier, with branches stretching up to the ceiling. Thanksgiving was approaching, Johns favorite day of the year, when he left the apartment to be among friends. But this year, 2015, he didnt think he would be well enough to go. The kitchen looked exactly as it had on my last visit and the one before, because John made sure nothing was ever changedhe was losing his eyesight, and he feared that if anything was moved he wouldnt be able to find it. On the small TV and VCR by the refrigerator he was getting ready to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , which always cheered him up. He knew the movie so well that he didnt need to see the screen.

We were talking about the things in Johns life that gave him pleasure. It took a little prompting, because John always began on the dark side, and it wasnt a visit unless he said he wanted to die. Yet once he got going, his mood always brightened.

I played the second act of Parsifal recently, with Jonas Kaufmann, he said, wrapping himself in the memory. The most beautiful tenor Ive ever heard. Very romantic-looking. The first time I saw him was after Walter died. He was singing and my God he was good.

John, who was ninety-one at the time, was one of six strangers I began visiting at the start of 2015 who unexpectedly changed my life. Im sure none of them intended to play that role. I met them while reporting a newspaper series called 85 & Up, in which I set out to follow six older New Yorkers for a year.

It began, as all stories do, with a search for characters. I met them at senior centers and in nursing homes, through home care agencies or their personal web pages. Some were still working; some never left the house. I met abiding Communists and mah-jongg players and Holocaust survivors and working artists and a ninety-six-year-old lesbian metalworker who still organized tea dances. All had lost something: mobility, vision, hearing, spouses, children, peers, memory. But few had lost everything. They belonged to one of the fastest-growing age groups in America, now so populous that they had their own name: the oldest old.

I, too, had lost some things. My marriage had come apart after nearly three decades, and I was living alone for the first time. I was fifty-five years old, with a new girlfriend and new questions about my place in the world: about age, about love and sex and fatherhood, about work and satisfaction.

I was also the main caregiver for my eighty-six-year-old mother, who moved from her ranch house in New Jersey to an apartment building for seniors in Lower Manhattan after my fathers death. It was not a role I performed with much distinction. I did my best to have dinner with her every couple of weeks and accompanied her on the occasional night in the ER. I pretended not to notice that she might want more than thatbest to honor her independence, I told myselfand so did she. Neither of us was well equipped for the stage of life we had stumbled into together: she, at eighty-six, without an idea of where to find meaning, and me without an idea of how to help. But there we were.

One of the first people I interviewed for the series was a woman named Jean Goldberg, 101, a former secretary at Crayola, who began our conversation by shouting Get me a gin! and then proceeded to tell the story of the man who did her wrongseventy years in the past, but still as near as anything in her life. She was in a wheelchair in a nursing home, but she had lived in her own apartment until she was 100, when she had a series of falls and no longer felt safe on her own. After a great first meeting, she asked to postpone our second interview because she was not feeling well; by the time the new date arrived, she was gone. Whatever strategies she had devised to take her to age 101humor, I think, but also a stubborn refusal to yield, even when it cost herwere gone with her.

Each person had a story to tellabout their family lives during the Great Depression or their sex lives during the Second World War, about participating in the civil rights movement or being told by their parents that they werent college material. But mainly I was interested in what their lives were like now, from the moment they got up until they went to bed. How did they get through the day, and what were their hopes for the morrow? How did they manage their medications, their children, and their changing bodies, which were now reversing the trajectory of childhood, losing capabilities as fast as they had once gained them? Was there a threshold at which life was no longer worth living?

Their qualifications as experts were simply that they were living it. As the British novelist Penelope Lively, then eighty, put it, One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here. Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers. I joined them in their homes, on trips to the doctor, in the hospital, in jazz clubs and bars and a beach house on the Jersey shore. I met their children, their lovers, doctors, home attendants, friends, and a former district attorney who had prosecuted one for obscenity long ago, and who now wanted to apologize. When one suddenly disappeared, his phone disconnected, I tracked him through Brooklyns hospital system, where he was having parts of two toes amputated. I listened and learned.

Gradually I noticed something quite unexpected happening. Every visit, no matter how dark the conversation gotand some days it got quite morbidraised my spirits like no other work I have ever done. I expected the year to bring great changes in them. I didnt expect it to change me.

The six became my surrogate elders: warm, cranky, demanding, forgetful, funny, sage, repetitive, and sometimes just too weary to talk. They chided me for not visiting enough and fed me chocolates or sent me clippings to read. I changed lightbulbs in their apartments and nodded sympathetically about Israel and told them about my relationship with my mother. Often they were admirable. They held grudges and devised Rube Goldbergtype systems for remembering to take their medicationsfoolproof as long as they didnt drop the little white heart pills, which were too small for their fingers and invisible on the floor.

With them I had to give up the idea that I knew about life. It was a humbling experience, but also an energizing one. I didnt have to be the expert or critic, challenging the things they told me. Instead I let them guide me through the world as they saw it. I gained the most from accepting ideas that my instincts told me to reject. My instincts thought they knew what it was like to be ninety, but they didnt, and as soon as I quieted them, the learning got a lot easier. Being an expert is exhausting. Being a studentletting go of your egois like sitting for a banquet at the best restaurant youll ever visit.