Sense of Freedom

My research on women has revealed that the most common characteristic for healthy women over age 60 is their energized sense of freedom: we have chosen generativity! With our children grown and, hopefully, not living at home anymore; with work focused on what we really want to be doing; and with time to give back to our communities and to travel, we feel liberated from the mundane and obligatory aspects of life. Freedom is the critical gain in the years over 60—if one has health and a reasonable amount of money. For women, freedom and generativity are essential ingredients of positive aging.

In the years after age 90, called our elderlife, both men and women are primarily concerned with maintaining their health and well-being. They hope to keep their mental faculties, vision, hearing, and mobility for as long as they can. Many men and women in their 90s are still quite active and engaged with life.

My own widower uncle, who is 95, and his “girlfriend” drive from Connecticut to New York every week to go to dinner and the theater. They are interested in politics, local events, and various social trends.
My uncle still has enough friends to have had five 95th birthday events given in his honor. Although his eyesight is diminishing a bit from macular degeneration, he drives in the daytime, reads large-print books, and writes in his journal every night. After 90, some level of diminished physical well-being is to be expected.

However, in the group of 40 women that my co-author and I studied for our book, A Time of Our Own: In Celebration of Women Over Sixty, our eldest interviewee (Marion Downs, also a Silver Planet Silver Star), who was then 92½, was still skiing, playing competitive tennis, and exercising every day. On her 90th birthday, she parachuted out of an airplane! Not your ordinary woman! She certainly was and is now, at age 95, a role model. I recommend to you her sassy book, Shut Up and Live! (You Know How): A 93-Year-Old’s Guide to Living to a Ripe Old Age.