As life expectancy rises in this country, Canadians face more years with grey hair and creaking bones. In her new book, You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready?, sociologist Lyndsay Green interviewed 40 seniors identified as role models for aging well by the people who know them. What she discovered is that money matters far less than learning to laugh about your hearing aid.
In your opening chapter, you give some simple advice: Be charming. Is one of the most important lessons of aging well making sure you are fun to hang out with?
It's absolutely the most important lesson. Once you are older there are often very few reasons for people to hang out with you unless you are charming. You aren't offering them networking opportunities or career advancement prospects. Who will hang out with you when all you have is yourself?
You describe your Aunt Jean who made close friendships with the staff at her nursing home, partly because she couldn't relate to her fellow residents. She certainly appears to have been that great-aunt you'd always like to visit. What are the most important things you learned from her?
She made an enormous effort to put on her face for me – in the metaphorical sense. She prepared herself for her visit with me. She would have clearly boned up on some topical event, some public issues that she wanted to debate and would ask my opinion on.
She did not talk about her failing health or her medical problems. She asked me about myself and remembered things I talked about at our last visit. She stayed really curious, engaged, and genuinely seemed interested in what was going on around her.
But Aunt Jean, she was very mentally spry. She had a lot of advantages in the charming area. What if you can’t remember things or you are struggling in those areas?
It’s how we accept our diminishing capacity that really will reveal our ability to attract people and become part of the emotional circle that we are going to need so desperately when we age. I’ve got a wonderful story from a grandson who told me about his two grandmothers, one of whom had really never been as sharp as the other one but as she started to forget things she just laughed it off. The grandmother who had been very clever really resented the fact that she couldn’t remember things and bore it with not very much grace. So she wasn’t that fun to hang out with any more.
And I guess we know who got the most visits?
Exactly.
As you point out, we image ourselves as grey, saggy versions of our younger selves in the senior years. That’s wishful thinking, isn’t it?
It is, but one of the most astonishing findings for me is that age isn’t just a loss of youth, it’s a new stage of opportunity. I had not appreciated that at all. I was assuming that I was just going to have learn to deal with a very difficult future. There are benefits that come with that new stage – worries are often reduced, you are no longer in the thick of things so life is more stress free, you have more control over your time, you no longer have to please others. And one of the most powerful prerogatives of age is the permission to speak the truth.
But doesn’t that make your company less welcome?
It depends on how you phrase it. I have seen people speak their truth in a very candid, funny, amusing way. Presentation is everything.
You also make the point that you should have a work plan rather than a retirement plan.
