News

On a weekday morning, four old women show up at St. James Anglican Church hall to crunch their abs at workout class.Helen Zajchowski, 84, marches around the room, singing along to Doris Day's Que Sera Sera, blending with the low hum of other voices and keeping time to the music.

Kay Russell, the youngest at 81, is warming up in her shorts, swinging her arms and bouncing her ankles like someone 20 years her junior; when she flexes her leg, her calf muscle ripples.

Alison Royale, hunched over with osteoporosis and a slipped disc, thick purple veins running like train tracks along her 87-year-old hands, carries a cane, but taps it to the ground only every third step, or when she thinks the instructor might be watching. It frustrates her that Gay Elliott, the former gym teacher who paces the middle of the room ordering up squats and shoulder rolls on a headset, won't let her do floor exercises any more.

"But when Gay's away," Mrs. Royale whispers, "I use the mat. It's good for me to use my muscles."

And then there's Nora Prinsze, going blind in her 91st year, lifting her two-pound weights on the far side of the hall. Though she occasionally takes breaks, Nora can still do almost every exercise in the class -- including a reverse abdominal crunch, in which she kneels down on her mat, presses her face to the floor, locks her arms behind her back and lifts her shoulders off the ground with her stomach muscles.

This morning, she is moving a little more slowly than usual because she feels dizzy, but she wasn't going to stay home.

Helen Zajchowski and her friends are nothing like the doddering old women of stereotypes. And in their village of Hudson, Que., 50 kilometres west of Montreal, they're not even that unusual. The average age in their mostly female fitness class is 75. They joke about rocking chairs while they're lugging golf clubs to the ninth hole or pounding out emoticon-sprinkled e-mail messages to their grandkids.

There's no denying their age: They have wrinkles too deep for Botox, soft bellies, white frothy hair and that slow-motion way of moving for care of crumbling bones. Together, their time on earth totals 3½ centuries. They can remember their fathers returning home from one war, and their men heading off to another. They have seen children grown and husbands buried, and learned to live with fuzzy memories and blurry vision.

You don't get to your 80s without losing something, they say. What makes the difference is which side of the ledger you live by -- the losses or the gains.

They are proof that old age is not the constant suffering imagined by people still young, or at least doesn't have to be. That's good news, since Canadians are aging fast. In 1971, 7 per cent of the population was over the age of 65; by 2002, that number had nearly doubled, and in the next 50 years, it will double again.

The number of the very oldest seniors will triple: In 2040, there will be an estimated 1.6 million Canadians over the age of 85. Women may lose the advantage eventually, but right now they are roughly twice as likely as men to make it to their eighth decade. Today, women over the age of 80 outnumber Canada's farmers 2 to 1.

As a society, Canadians are doing everything a little later than the generation before: We leave our parents' homes later, we marry and have babies later, and we get old later. Seniors live longer in their own homes, managing with help from family and friends, and are less likely to be found lingering in nursing homes, until the most serious health problems make it necessary.

But an aging population -- even a relatively healthy one -- brings its burdens: a growing demand for home care; a rising incidence of dementia; the intensive care required in the nursing homes that take the oldest and sickest.

In a nation of seniors, the luckiest ones will age like the foursome in Ms. Elliott's aerobics class, side-stepping to the tunes of Elvis and Ethel Merman. They signed up, in the beginning, on doctor's orders. Mrs. Russell brought her husband in his wheelchair and watched from the side. After he died, she started coming alone.

For a while, the four even travelled to community centres and schools, performing a workout routine to pop songs as the Old Spice Girls.

This is aerobics without mirrors and pretense. There are not many gyms where the instructor asks for "the diaper walk," and the room rumbles with laughter, while everyone steps wide-legged in a circle miming diapers in their pants. "Some of you," Ms. Elliott deadpans, "have some very soggy diapers."

But then, these women aren't coming to sweat off calories. Mostly, what draws them on these mornings is the ready-made social community; the class ends with coffee and fruit served from the kitchen, and a cake if it's somebody's birthday. They are here to keep moving, when their bodies could so easily melt into a La-Z-Boy and never leave. They have seen it happen too often, this way of becoming a statue until death truly turns you to stone.

Mrs. Zajchowski flexes an arm and gives Mrs. Russell a nudge as she heads for coffee. "We refuse to get any older, don't we?"

"The food is terrible here," one of Alison Royale's roommates sniffs across the lunch table, wrinkling her nose at the chicken-salad sandwich on the plate before her. She also hates the animals that wander around the residence -- the parrot, the snooty Persian cats and the poodle, Trevor, who's missing his larynx but still trots the hallway barking hoarsely at visitors. In fact, the woman announces, she can't stand her new home at all: "In my day," she grumbles, "you didn't just dump Grandma somewhere."

Sitting next to her at the table, sprinkling flaxseed on her fruit cup, Mrs. Royale winces, and says nothing. She was a minister's wife, after all, with a half-century's practice at patient listening. But she misses the quiet freedom of her home in Hudson, now rented out to a single mom.

She moved into the assisted-living house about a year ago, after a blocked intestine landed her in the hospital and she decided she could use some help with meals; she has a brightly lit room at the top of the stairs with a private bathroom she keeps secret from her roommates, pretending it is a closet because she suspects it would only inspire more complaints.

As it is, she tolerates the woman across the hall who barges into her room to rant about another resident's smelly diapers. Lunch, she endures.

"They were actually on their best behaviour today," she explains later. "Sometimes I get a little uptight when they argue about who's the sickest. Especially their diarrhea: they describe that in detail."

Mrs. Royale will have none of this. She still gets to exercise class and choir practice and sends regular e-mail messages to her grandchildren. She jokes about turning 88 in February. "Now that's old," she says.

Ask about her health, and she shrugs: "I've been blessed with a long life, a good life. There's the odd ache or pain, but anybody can have those. I am just able to see the funny side of things. That makes a big difference -- if you can laugh at yourself."

A sense of humour doesn't make all the difference, of course. Good genes might take some credit, but the case isn't consistent: Mrs. Prinsze's mother and grandmother may have lived into their 90s, but Mrs. Russell's mom died when she 55.

You can't put it all down to weight training, either, because the four ladies didn't start exercising until a few years ago; in their day, nobody jogged unless someone was chasing them. They did have the advantage of growing up in a generation that walked and danced and worked their brains counting bridge hands -- the same stay-young activities now promoted in medical journals.

They were careful about what they ate, and they didn't smoke, at least not for long. They weren't much for sitting around. Mrs. Prinsze travelled back to her home in Holland in her 80s, Mrs. Zajchowski went south to swim in the ocean. Mrs. Russell crisscrossed North America with her husband, Art, showcasing the miniature dollhouse furniture she helped him build in his retirement. All of them mention the church -- believing in God, they say, gives you an edge in adversity.

They know death well, in all its forms. Mrs. Royale's husband lay down for a nap on their 51st wedding anniversary; she found him gasping for air and he died before the doctor arrived.

Simon Prinsze lost his mind to Alzheimer's. He started calling the police over imaginary burglars and tried to climb out the window because he thought the house was flooded, and it went for so long that Mrs. Prinsze struggles now to remember him strong and healthy.

When Art Russell went to a nursing home because his wife could no longer manage his care, Kay sat with him every day for two years; now, she tidies the flowers at his grave every week.

And Mrs. Zajchowski spent months believing that her husband, Stan, would recover from a stroke, and then eight years knowing he never would; he died from a bout of pneumonia not knowing her name.

But they have better memories, and living-room walls covered in black-and-white pictures and paintings to jog them. These are the stories they like to tell, about meeting their husbands at dance halls and Scout troops, and having babies and watching the world change.

Mrs. Prinsze can roll her eyes at the panicked reaction when the power went out during the Quebec ice storm: At the end of the war in Holland, when railway workers stopped the trains to force the Germans out, she and a neighbour loaded their bikes with pantyhose and sewing kits, and pedalled 100 kilometres through snowy fields, bartering food from the farmers to feed their children in Amsterdam.

Mrs. Zajchowski can recount with dramatic flourish how, during the Battle of Britain, she answered an ad seeking art graduates that had been posted at the train station and ended up building contour models from maps of France and Sicily to train pilots on their secret missions. "It was all very hush-hush," she says. "We were the only little section who did that in the whole Allied Forces."

On leaves, she would run off to see her Polish fighter pilot, when she was supposed to be home with her parents; he had made her fall in love with him while knowing only 100 words of English.

Their favourite scenes from the past, the ones worth lingering over, almost always involve their men. Mrs. Russell practically swoons when she mentions Art, and Mrs. Zajchowski says that even now, when the train rattles past her apartment balcony, she can recreate the old rush of seeing Stan walk over the hill toward home, from his job at Canadian Pacific.

What matters, as Mrs. Royale pegs it, is that they are laughing when they tell these stories.

On a Friday night, in the same church hall where she does her workouts, Helen Zajchowski is sipping white wine in a wooden seat, waiting for the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. A group of teenaged actors scurry behind curtain sets.

Mrs. Zajchowski is almost certainly the oldest person in the room, not that she would notice. To bide the time, she is checking out the men. There's one who's not here tonight, she whispers in her proper British accent, who almost makes her wish she were "40 years younger."

But she can't be bothered pining for another shot at middle age. She has had her great romance, and from it, three sons to serve as the men in her life. Anyway, she says, the dating prospects at her age "are a little thin on the ground."

She packs her calendar with other entertainment -- bridge games and lunches and all variety of social gatherings. "Life," she likes to joke, "has become a series of cucumber sandwiches and tea." She attends every local play on principle, being one of only two honorary life members of the Hudson Players, and performs occasional readings herself, favouring the funny bits.

But her days of playing Mother Courage and Madam Acarti are over: Her memory can't organize all those lines any more, though not from lack of use. In October, she avidly followed the debates between George W. Bush and John Kerry. She has opinions about Britney Spears's bellybutton. Each morning before breakfast, she completes the crossword puzzle in the Montreal Gazette. Yet in this one thing she once did so well, her mind has failed her. "I'm 84," she says. "What do I expect?"

That is the remarkable quality about these four women, this amusement at the challenge of getting old. They have not escaped: Along with her thin bones, Mrs. Royale is losing her hearing, and awaiting a cataract operation. Mrs. Prinsze had to give up the piano because she can no longer see the sheet music. When she offers a guest lemon bread, she jokes about how she dumped half the flour on the counter because her bad eyes misjudged the position of the bowl. Her dizzy spell at exercise class was the precursor to a minor heart attack that landed her in hospital for five days.

Mrs. Zajchowski shows off her 20-year-old Toyota station wagon, which she will not replace when it finally sputters out; "My licence is good for four years now," she says, "but I think that's a bit rash."

Even Mrs. Russell, on the light side of 80, tends to lose track of her appointments once in a while. But on one of her regular golf games, she is the one dragging her clubs over hills for nine holes, a ball cap wedged over grey curls, while her two friends ride in the cart. At the tee, she squints playfully at the ball: "I think it's getting smaller on me."

They don't keep score because nobody's worried about approximating par, and to be honest, Mrs. Russell says, by the eighth hole she's starting to think about a cold beer. Last summer, she passed out in the clubhouse -- from heat stroke, she thinks -- but mostly she focuses on the men who came to her aid.

"That's one way to get them," she grins.

But does she think about the day when she might really get sick, when passing out might not be so easy to laugh off?

"Goodness gracious," she says. "I am not going to worry about that."

The four of them have gathered over tea and chocolates in the living room of Mrs. Royale's residence, to discuss the tricks to staying young even when you are very old.

"Once you say you can't do something," Mrs. Russell says, "you're dead."

"Who needs to relax?" Mrs. Zajchowski says. "It's all that sitting around that's so exhausting."

The best thing about getting older, they agree, are the memories of a good life, and the freedom to do just about anything they damn well please. They say they don't want to be young again. But Mrs. Royale does miss her car, and Mrs. Prinsze her music. Asked what they miss most, Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Zajchowski raise pointed eyebrows and giggle. They're not going there, they say.

The secret of youth is to stay curious and independent as long as you can, Mrs. Prinsze says, which feeds into their theory of why women outlive men: "They are a bit more helpless than us," Mrs. Zajchowski says. "And I don't think men find the same satisfaction from their friends. You don't call up a male friend to have a good gossip." She waits a beat for the laughter. "Not that we do that."

They realize, though, that time is catching up. Mrs. Russell suspects that some time soon, she will have to leave her house and the lawn she still rakes occasionally, and find a smaller apartment, maybe closer to her children. Mrs. Prinsze, who lives in her own house beside her daughter's, knows that one day she'll have to accept the standing offer to move next door.

Meanwhile, life awaits.

"I want to live a long time, because I'd like to know what happens next," Mrs. Zajchowski says. "You'll know what I mean when you're my age. Will Mount St. Helens blow? Will they cure breast cancer? Is global warming going to get worse? I just want to know."

Erin Anderssen is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail. Her series continues next week with a look at caring for aging relatives.