Jenifer’s Journal: A role model for successful living

I call my third mother-in-law “Momax.” I’m the only one who does. 

She turned 100 on Feb. 16. Her handsome son, Tom, not having inherited the longevity gene, passed away two years ago this coming June, sharing only 15 short years with me.

I was just turning 58 — a veritable baby — when I first met his mother. She was 86, neat, petite package of energy, wit, wisdom and, as it happened, serious talent as an artist, a writer, and a poet, all of which she modestly corralled behind a demure, ladylike exterior.

As I came to know her, I began to understand the challenges she must’ve faced as a free spirit trying to balance the demands of her two passions, her family and her art, within the conventional confines of mid-century Connecticut.

She managed it somehow, becoming more, not less, of herself in the process. She lived her life with creativity, grace, humor (and only occasional guilt) well into her 80s and beyond, even in the face of the incalculable loss of her younger son, Billy, who was killed years ago when he was 25, and then Tom.

Within six months of my meeting her, she’d made it into my “Most Admired Women” list, and has remained there ever since.

About a month or so ago I called to see if she and my sister-in-law had found and made appointments to get vaccinated. They both qualified. She said, “No, not yet, and besides, they should give my shot to someone younger, where it would actually make a difference.”  Really? Really?

It happened that I’d just finished reading an article in The New York times headlined, “How the oldest old can endure even this” by John Leland, so I didn’t spend much time scolding her, I just sent her the article.

It reads, in part: “A surprise of the pandemic has been how well many older adults have adapted to the restrictions. ‘There’s crisis competence,” said Mark Brennan-Ing, a senior research scientist at Hunter College’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging. ‘As we get older, we get the sense that we’re going to be able to handle it, because we’ve been able to handle challenges in the past. You know you get past it. These things happen, but there’s an end to it, and there’s a life after that.’ While people of all ages have struggled this year, those 65 and up are still more likely to rate their mental health as excellent compared with people under 50.”

I’m a Boomer for crying out loud, an “adolescent” old person on the front edge of a generation that was taught early on to not only never trust anybody over 30, but, if we could possibly manage it, find a way to avoid 30 altogether. Our society has happily complied and underwritten being young and staying young ever since.

In our frantic attempts to avoid aging we’ve made the purveyors of “eternal youth” very rich. How many of my generation have bought those negative cultural assumptions about growing older, that we’ll be seen as weak, unattractive, invisible.

Yes, there are challenges both physical and mental in the aging process, but, as the article points out, the “oldest old” are not the feeble, fragile, irrelevant “place-holders” our society would have us believe. 

Until I met Momax, I had no idea how to grow old. The Boomer playbook stopped at page 30. For us 70-somethings especially (Botox notwithstanding),we need to be able to look to our precious senior Seniors for how to move into a rich, meaningful old age. Eventually, our children will need us to do the same for them.

And, now, with the devastating diminution wrought by COVID of the grandparent ranks, for the sake of all living generations, it’s more crucial than ever that we get that vaccination, go for that check-up, see that counselor, practice self-care physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and ask for help in doing so when necessary. It’s our responsibility to ourselves and to the ones who so need our example. 

In the spirit of that self-care, as our Island considers ways of implementing the ideas included in its Comprehensive Plan, the town’s Director of Senior Services Laurie Fanelli tells me that, with the Senior Center about to re-open, several of those ideas speak to the expansion of resources regarding all aspects of Senior well-being.

My Momax could live another 100 years and still not exhaust her usefulness as a role model for successful living. Only a truly elderly person can provide that kind of example.

Creative, joyful, resilient and lovingly connected to life? Sounds pretty young to me.