Possibility Aging With Patrick Roden

If you’re having trouble getting rolling this Monday, check out Patrick Roden’s story below about his chance meeting with Mavis Lindgren. It’ll make you hop and feel incredibly good doing it.Patrick blogs at homebychoiceblog.com. He began the first few years of his life crawling around the floors of a nursing home where his grandmother was the head nurse. He later became a nursing assistant while pursuing his B.A. in nursing. And then he met Mavis Lindgren in 1992. That chance meeting with a 85-year-old marathon participant led him on a path of 'possibility aging' and even more learning and growth (Patrick’s full bio is here).Thanks, Patrick, for sharing your story with Changing Aging readers.

Meeting and Running With Mavis

Night’s chill lingered in the air and the silence was broken by the sounds of songbirds. The sun was just beginning to rise on a crisp October morning in 1992. Suddenly the squeaking brakes of a rental truck and the clanging of folding chairs shattered the serenity. With military precision, the volunteers began to set up the first aid station at the 18-mile marker. I was one of those volunteers and this was the annual running of the Portland Marathon.It took an hour to set up and go through my checklist. The first aid kit was in order and the communications were working. We were ready. Soon the elite runners would be flying through, followed by a seemingly endless sea of participants. The conditions were perfect: a bright clear indigo sky, golden fall leaves. All of us were anticipating an inspiring day.The morning had been uneventful at our station. The usual blisters, Vaseline applied to chaffed skin, hydration to the dehydrated, and lots of moral support. One pregnant woman reached the 18-mile point and could go no further so we loaded her in the ambulance. They taxied her to the finish line and her anxiously awaiting husband.It was now late afternoon and the sea of runners had dwindled to a trickle of determined souls. The frequent and now familiar static that preceded a message from the EMS broke the airwaves. An elderly woman was reported down near the 18-mile mark, in our territory. I waited for a person fitting the description to pass, and no one did. Strapping on my first aid kit, I set out to investigate. Running upstream, I began to think, how elderly could they mean? Who ever it was, he or she had gone 18 miles, and this was a marathon after all€¦€¦.50, maybe 60, I thought. As I rounded the bend I saw a young woman attending the injured runner who looked like Mother Theresa in running shorts! The young woman explained that another runner had cut in front of the injured woman and knocked her down as she stepped towards the curb. As I listened, I assessed the situation. The injuries included an obviously fractured wrist as well as a small bump on the head. 'Her name is Mavis,' the young woman said.'Mavis, I would like to escort you to the first aid station,' I began€¦ 'Young man, I’m going to finish this race,' she politely interrupted. After a few seconds of negotiating, I held up her injured arm and we briskly took off for the station (or so I thought).Amazed, I blurted out 'How old are you?' 'I’m 85.' She pointed to her number pinned to the front of her T-shirt. 'Every year, they give me the number of my age. This year I’m number 85. ' What do you mean each year?' I asked.Mavis Lindgren had run all over the world. She had appeared many times on TV, radio, and magazines such as Runner’s World, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times, and been mentioned in books such as Age Wave (Ken Dychtwald) and Grandma Wears Running Shoes (Patricia Horning Benton). She was no stranger to Portland, either. All along the course there were signs encouraging her and the cheers followed her every step! Two middle-aged women ran up and hugged her exclaiming that they wanted to be just like her when they grew up.Mavis and I reached the finish line arm-in-arm, right into interviews for the 6’oclock news (I have the video). I was asked to escort her for the entire race the next year in 1993, and it became a tradition.She retired from running at age 90 after the 1997 marathon. It was her 75th and final 26.2-mile outing. Phil Knight of Nike, had a custom pair of 'Air Mavis' running shoes made especially for her final marathon. Her two daughters and grandchildren accompanied us and it was an emotional finale to an illustrious running career.What makes her story all the more exceptional to me is that at age 62, Mavis was leading a sedentary life, spending most of time reading, writing and knitting. She had suffered four bouts of pneumonia in five years and, as a retired nurse, she knew the antibiotics weren’t the long-term solution. Something had to change. A doctor urged her to join an early bird walking group. At age 70, encouraged by her son, she ran her first marathon! Two years later, she established a record of 4:33.05, and for the next eight years, held world’s best time for women 70 and over. And at 84 she finished the Los Angeles marathon in 6 hours 45 minutes-the fastest woman in her age category. 'After I started running, I never had another cold,' she said. Asked what his message was, Ghandi replied: 'My life is my message.' This could well be said about Mavis Lindgren.

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by origineight

Late Life Love: A Valentine’s Interview With Author Connie Goldman

Jim Lehrer, host of PBS' Newshour, says:

'Connie Goldman is on to something. It’s called life …'

Connie is a former host of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Before joining National Public Radio, she worked at Minnesota Public Radio in Saint Paul. In 1983, she formed her own production company in Santa Monica, California. Much of her work at Connie Goldman Productions has focused on exploring the positive aspects of aging in a culture that seems to be obsessed with 'staying young.' She has written five books, including Late Life Love, The Gifts of Caregiving, The Ageless Spirit, Secrets of Becoming a Late Bloomer, and Tending the Earth, Mending the Spirit. With Valentines Day upon us, 'Changing Aging' is pleased to bring you this interview with Connie Goldman, and her insights on Late Life Love:What inspired you to write Late Life Love?There was a period of about eight months when people kept telling me about their mother or their grandmother or their dad who (they whispered quietly to me) was having a love affair! Why the astonishment I wondered. I started to think about some of the jokes and remarks I’d heard over the year about “those old people”. I remembered remarks like “aren’t they too old to do that?” or “I’ve never gotten used to the idea of my parents in bed together now that they’re older”. There was another challenge waiting for me in my mission to deal with damaging negative stereotypes about aging. My way of passing along information that share real life stories. Late Life Love€”Romance and New Relationship in the Later Years is a collection of 22 stories that scratches the surface of the variety of relationship newly formed between people in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Do you feel that love in one’s older years is different than love earlier in life?First let me clarify that in this book I don’t explore relationships that have a long history. Long married couples and their evolving patterns of love, adjustment, change, and all the changes and challenges of such relationship is another book. Your question has me thinking about that. Long marriages might end up being my next project! However, in Late Life Love I looked for couples that met and formed a new relationship in late mid-life and the years beyond. They had dealt with the death of a wife or husband, had a divorce after 40 or 50 years of marriage, or possibly had never married. The next question I’m guessing will be “but what about sex?” Yes, physical love and exchange of deep affection can be different from those wild times when we’re young. My conversations with the couples I spoke with covered the sexual and the physical and each talked as little or as long as they chose to share with me. But you asked about love and much of what they told me was that this new love was special; special in a way that maturity, life experience, accumulated self-knowledge and yes, wisdom were ingredients that contributed to the partnership in a different and unique way. Love in late life means a caring relationship, companionship, appreciation of life and life together in new ways. Some of the couples were wealthy, some had modest retirement incomes, a few I talked with had much less as far as material goods. Maybe the best way to end my answer to this question is to quote the last sentence in the book from the story of Laura and Robert. I think each couple in their own words said something like this:“We have everything we need, and thankfully, we have each other.”Can a person who had an incredibly close relationship with someone for years love fully again after one’s spouse dies?From what I learned in a number of these interviews, yes. The new love doesn’t replace the original partner. Each relationship is deep and meaningful but in different times of one’s life and in different ways. We’re really different people with different needs, different life goals, and wanting different things in a relationship earlier in life. Some I spoke with were actively seeking a new relationship while expecting to live out their remaining days alone. They cherished the memory of their spouse, had adult children and grandchildren to share their lives, their work or hobbies or other connections. They weren’t looking for love. Yet one day, there it was, an unexpected attraction, shared conversation, time spent together, and habit became comfort and comfort turned into deeper feelings of love and commitment. There are often concerns with the feelings of adult children when some see the new partner as a replacement for the lost parent. Yet each couple I spoke with met these situations in their own way and none of them abandoned their new relationship.What were you surprised to learn in your research for Late Life Love?When I would finish the interview with a number of the couples, they’d tell my about their cousin who just got re-married at age 82 or their father who was dating a woman in her mid-70’s who lived next door, or a friend who didn’t plan to marry but was happily living for the past 19 months with a gentleman she met at a local senior center. Did I want to contact them? They’d be happy to connect me.My surprise was what I’ve now come to accept as how things really are. Older couples are coming together, planning how they’re going to live, separately or together, married or not, linked by a wedding ring and a legal wedding ceremony, a spiritual commitment ceremony or simply sharing a life in their own special way. There’s no one pattern. As older people mate up they plan their own road map for their lives together. Why should I have been surprised? I’m doing the same thing!You began a relationship in your 70’s. What have you learned from your own Late Life Love?I was one of those long single women, divorced many years ago. I had a career, my children were grown, married, on their own, I had friends all over the country, and my life was interesting, busy and fun. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. Then I ran into an old friend who had lost his wife a number of years earlier. It was so comfortable to be with him. It was a unique experience for me to slow down and just be with someone. Our friendship grew into a love I never expected, a caring connection that satisfied something in me that I wasn’t aware that I needed until it woke up inside of me. I deeply care for this man; I respect him, admire him, and love him. A special love that’s just for him. The years of my late life are richer for having this commitment. I was lucky to have the opportunity to find my late life love.Do you feel relationships in older life take on a greater sense of urgency or have a faster pace because life is closer to the end than the beginning?When I connected with the man I now live with we had a long distance relationship. He lived near the Twin Cities and I resided at that time in Los Angeles. We would take vacations together and visit each other in the cities we each lived in. It was romantic and fun. Then one day we talked about our deeper commitment to one another and we realized that for us, both in our 70’s that the geography no longer worked for us. I come originally from Minneapolis although I haven’t lived there since 1975 but my daughter lives there, I have family in the area and Minnesota was always “home in my heart”. So the decision was easy. I made the move back. That was the right decision for us. I don’t think as you had asked that I’d call it a sense of urgency or that we moved together faster than a young couple in love who wanted to be together who might feel a sense of urgency. I guess we’re among those people in the later years who are realistic about the number of years behind us and the possible number of years ahead in our lives, and we wanted to live each day we had left together, not apart. I know every older couple looks at how they’re going to work out in their own way the particulars of sharing a life. Some couples in my book keep their lives in separate houses or apartments and move their relationship from one to the other depending on their particular plans.Two couples I spoke with live in different countries (specifically in my interviews one partner in Canada, the other in the US) and they prefer it that way. As I said earlier. each couple designs their own arrangement and they feel free to do that. They’re adults you know!What stereotypes of love in later life should just be thrown away?In my opinion negative stereotypes continue to pervade our thinking about older persons. For many individuals, including the media and the advertising and marketing industry, much of what we hear and read is that the way to grow old is to stay young. 60 is the new 30. In that frame of mind someone wrinkled, gray-haired, walking slowly or stooped over doesn’t fit with craving physical contact and affection, experiencing deep love and caring for a new person in their lives. We’ve got some un-learning to do in our culture before we can accept the reality that new relationship in later life is part of the beautiful reality of aging. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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by origineight

Join Ecumen at The Aging Services of Minnesota Conference Today and Tomorrow

If you happen to be at the Aging Services of Minnesota Conference on Thursday, stop by and visit with folks from Ecumen, who will be leading several sessions today and tomorrow.Tomorrow at 2 p.m. Ecumen will be leading a session on engaging volunteers in spiritual care. The session will be led by Pastor Ron Gerl of Ecumen, who will share highlights of a recruitment and training program at the Ecumen Parmly LifePointes community. Joining him will be baby boomer volunteer Dave Ronvang, a former pilot for Northwest Airlines, and I will also be sharing insights from our Ecumen Age Wave study as it relates to engaging new volunteers, particularly baby boomers.Ecumen’s Mary Cordts and Patricia McArdle will lead a session today at 2 p.m. called: Living Well … Aging Well that will discuss wellness and what they have learned through their work at the Vitalize Wellness Centre at Ecumen’s Parmly LifePointes community.At 3:30 today, Wendy Gordon, director of nutrition services at Ecumen’s Emmanuel Community in Detroit Lakes, Minn., will present on giving menus a healthy, creative, effective overhaul.Yesterday Ecumen’s regional director of finance Sue Koivisto and vice president of finance Scott Riddle presented on enhancing financial performance in aging services.

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by origineight

Nominate Someone for The Purpose Prize

Do you know someone over 60 who is putting passion to work?

Thanks to Changing Aging reader Ellen Schneider for forwarding this …The Purpose Prize® is accepting nominations, including self-nominations, at www.encore.org/prize until March 5th.The Purpose Prize® provides ten awards of up to $100,000 to social entrepreneurs, 60 years and older, who are solving some of our most pressing social issues €“ from health care to the environment, poverty to education.Winners are leading a national movement of people in encore careers utilizing their skill and experience for the greater good.

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by origineight

Jim Klobuchar: A Scavenger Hunt to Save Lives

Several of our readers who subscribe via email feed, said they didn’t receive Jim Klobuchar’s most recent post, so we’ve reposted it below … enjoy.

A Post by Jim Klobuchar, To read other 'Changing Aging' posts by Jim, go here:

I prowled my clothes racks and book shelves the other day. I rushed into the garage and dived into duffel bags clogged with 40-years worth of hiking gear. Boots and sweaters and four sets of wool underwear flew into the adjacent laundry room. I raided the cedar closet and produced three unused throw rugs from Peru.

I was in a scavenging frenzy and it was charged with guilt. Before my wife called in professional therapy, I explained this sudden frenzy.

A few weeks ago the Minneapolis Star Tribune told the story of Fran Heitzman, an 83-year-old-retired small businessman, a friend-of-humanity kind of guy, who was helping a single mother and her young daughter stock their kitchen.

He was adding some utensils to one of the trays when the girl exclaimed to her mother: “Just think, mom, now we won’t have to share spoons when we eat.”

When he got home Heitzman opened the kitchen drawers and liberated five sets of silver he and his wife didn’t need. It was the beginning of an expanding service now called Bridging. The idea is for thousands of people wading in stuff they no longer use€”particularly furniture€”to stock it in a warehouse in suburban Bloomington , where it’s put it into the hands of people who need. Anybody can play. Right now it’s become a furniture store for more than 5,700 struggling families.

I thought about my own too-much-stuff again a few days later when a woman speaking in church told of visiting Guatamala by bus with other church members. They drove through a village, looking at the scenes of poverty, and then someone said, “let’s get out of the bus,” an emotional summons to meet these people, hands-on and to look into their eyes not with pity but with a promise of befriending.

What I know from my travel is that these people want to lift their lives and their children’s lives. I know it from the hundreds I have seen and met and now have written about in a book called “The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism. It tells of the millions of poor but ambitious women around the world who build tiny businesses with loans as small as $50, loans that have to be repaid, and are at the astonishing rate of 97 percent.

But something else touched me deeper. Most of them are illiterate but they receive training in disease prevention, family planning and more. I attended the weekly meeting of a group of 30 women in Kathmandu, Nepal. A woman applied for a third loan. She had been signing the application form by using an inkpad and her thumb print. On this day she laboriously scrawled her name, for the first time. And then she stood and looked at the signature, and cried. She could write her name! Now, at the age of 50. And all of the women gathered around her, hugged her, and cried with her.

And so did I.

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by origineight

A 107-Candle Salute to Ecumen Customer Marion Davidson

What a great way to end the week - a 107th candle salute to Ecumen customer Marion Davidson.Happy Birthday from Changing Aging to Marion, who lives independently at the Ecumen community of Boardman Meadows in New Richmond, Wis.Any longevity keys we can take from Marion?When you talk with her, she talks about luck. And perhaps that and her genes are it, but when you meet her, you also can’t help but be struck by her positive, optimistic spirit (in fact, she lists two optimists as her favorite Presidents: FDR and Ronald Reagan) and her deep spiritual faith. She’s not been without significant challenges, including surviving cancer.Maybe Marion drinks a glass of red wine per day? Nope. She says she tried alcohol once, but couldn’t stand the taste and never had it again. Could diet be a big key? Well, Marion, will tell you that she eats what she wants - always has. So much for a one-size-fits-all approach to longevity.Our congratulations to Marion! We’re so glad you chose Ecumen!

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by origineight

The Beauty of Aging at Ecumen’s Villages of North Branch Community

For our readers in the North Branch, Minnesota, area: You’re invited to a special photo exhibit featuring the Beauty of Aging on Thursday, Feb. 5th from 4:30 to 7 p.m. at The Villages of North Branch, Ecumen community. Appetizers and refreshments will be served. Carol Seefeldt is a wonderful photographer, who has volunteered her time and skills with Ecumen communities. Thank you to her and our customers who shared themselves with us for this show.

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by origineight

Minneapolis' Take on Beacon Hill Village and Redefining Senior Living

A group of seniors takes a near-daily walk along the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis. Organized by a seniors co-op, they are, from left: Mary Margaret McMillan, 60; Ellie Hands, 69; Suzanne Joyce, 75; Peggy Lucas, 67; Delia Bujold, 70; and Barb Goldner, 64. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)'You can see the tracks,' said Ecumen trustee and Mill City Commons member Peggy Lucas in Jeremy Olson’s Saint Paul Pioneer Press article. She was talking about the resident deer near the Stone Arch Bridge on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, but she also could just as well have been talking about the groundbreaking tracks she and her neighbors are making by creating a new kind of community. Ecumen is proud to be working with these trailblazers to forge a new way. To read the full article, go here.

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by origineight

President Obama’s Web Site Features Long-Term Care - An American First

This is an American first … a presidential web site that features long-term care and long-term care financing. In the agenda' section on the White House web site, President Obama highlights long-term care with this paragraph below.

Strengthen Long-Term Care Options: Obama and Biden will work to give seniors choices about their care, consistent with their needs, and not biased towards institutional care. They will work to reform the financing of long term care to protect seniors and families, and to improve the quality of elder care by training more nurses and health care workers.

As the President and other policymakers think about innovating in long-term care financing reform, here are two great resources: AAHSA’s Long-Term Care Solution web site and Ecumen CEO Kathryn Roberts' whitepaper on long-term care financing, which you can download here in the long-term care section.

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by origineight

Ecumen Changing Aging Writer’s Work Hits White House Super Bowl Party

Changing Aging contributing writer Jim Klobuchar’s work was present at the White House for President Barack Obama’s Super Bowl party. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) was one of several guests who made up a politically diverse gathering at last evening’s White House Super Bowl gathering. For our readers outside of Minnesota, Sen. Klobuchar is Jim’s daughter.According to MinnPost, the Minnesota senator brought the Presidential host a signed copy of her father’s 1977 book, “Will the Vikings Ever Win the Super Bowl?”And, though the answer to that question might still be no, Jim wanted to make one point clear.'Dear Mr. President,' he wrote inside Obama’s copy. 'I would consider apologizing for the Vikings season, but the Bears was worse.'Watch for Jim’s next Changing Aging column this week. You can read his previous columns here.

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by origineight