Perennial Lives

When I was about thirty years old, I picked up a coffee-table book at an acquaintance’s house that intrigued me. It was called Fifty on Fifty: Wisdom, Inspiration, and Reflections on Women’s Lives Well Lived, by Bonnie Miller Rubin. As someone who was arriving later than average to typical mileposts, I found the stories inside deeply reassuring: Linda Ronstadt testifying about the freedom to continually reinvent her sound over the course of a thirty-year music career; reporter Nina Totenberg saying she was glad to have broken the biggest story of her career at age forty-seven rather than twenty-seven because “it was the kind of situation where only experience will save you.”

I could have used that assurance the year before, at UCLA. Already an older student, I was halfway through a degree in comparative literature when I approached a college counselor about adding music as a second major. He dismissed the idea, saying it would take too long. I can still see his stony face turning away from me, his pursed lips as closed as his mind, but the real villain in the story was not so much an unimaginative counselor as my own self-doubt. Why had I given such definitive authority to this gatekeeper of age? It’s silly now to think of another two-year postponement of my graduation date as negative in any meaningful way—as if a deathbed regret would be, “If only I had finished at age thirty-two instead of thirty-four!” 

In hindsight, I recognize the difference as inconsequential, but at the time, I wasn’t secure enough to risk being any more out of step in a situation where I was already the oldest student in the room. Instead of feeling proud of gradually working my way through college, I had a self-conscious sense of being “too old.”

That inhibition would never occur to me today—nor to the myriad of people I talk to in my role as the host and creator of My Better Half, a podcast that airs on Southern Oregon’s Jefferson Public Radio as part of its award-winning civic affairs program, The Jefferson Exchange. About once a month since our first episode aired in 2022, I interview individuals who in some way demonstrate or explore the creative potential of our later years. The vast majority of guests so far have been people who live in JPR’s broadcasting region, from far-Northern California to Southern Oregon. Others are just passing through: After she gave a concert in our area, I spoke to eighty-two-year-old Judy Collins, who was celebrating the release of her first entirely original album. 

Some guests have no local ties but have written about the subject in a way that transcends geography. When I talked with Ashton Applewhite about her book This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, she schooled me on the concept of “internal ageism” and how negative views of our own aging actually worsen our health. In 2023, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik told me about a series of tasks he challenged himself with in midlife, like finally learning to drive, and then wrote about in his book The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. 

Closer to home, it hasn’t been a challenge to find examples of Oregonians who are continually growing and even reinventing themselves as they age. 

When Eugene resident Yaakov Levine reached his forties, he found himself still looking for his life’s work. It was when he got involved with the ManKind Project, a global network of nonprofit men’s groups, that his mission crystallized. Building on his longtime goal of avoiding the fate of his father, who suffered heart attacks in his fifties that left him unable to care for himself, Yaakov was inspired by the mentorship he received to go back to school and earn credentials as a functional nutritional therapist. As he told me in our 2023 interview, he spent seven years in private practice before taking a position as a nutritional health coach for Natural Grocers. Now seventy-one, he has spent the last nine years guiding people toward their health goals.

Another guest, Diana Coogle, showed even greater disregard for traditional school age, earning her doctorate from the University of Oregon just one month before her sixty-eighth birthday. After a long career of teaching and writing (she was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1999), the Applegate resident said she didn’t feel like a late bloomer in the sense of accomplishing a long-delayed goal. It was more, as she put it, about “refusing to let the frost of old age freeze me into no longer blooming.”

No frost gathers under Diana’s feet. As she shared with me in 2024, she keeps a practice of setting goals before milestone birthdays, like walking eight hundred miles in the year before her eightieth. She continues to challenge herself with backpacking, backcountry skiing, and the idea of life as a continuum on which to keep staying active. “There is a Zen saying that I think describes a great deal of my life,” she said. “‘Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.’ One achieves the high points, but the essence of life doesn’t change.”

When I interviewed Deborah Costella, then sixty-seven years old, in November 2023, I found another example of someone building upon decades of experience in the same field. A transplant from Las Vegas, Deborah was ambitiously parlaying a long career as a personal chef, food writer, and cooking instructor into what she hoped would be a flourishing new chapter. She had just opened her own cooking school in downtown Ashland, and she was rightly proud of her bravery in doing so. In our interview, she shrugged off those who had doubted her leap of faith (“Why is Deborah opening a cooking school at her age?”) and said it actually strengthened her resolve as an entrepreneur.

Her enthusiasm was contagious, but any gardener knows that transplants don’t always take. While her business plan made sense on paper, in practice it’s been more difficult to break even with the new school. Two years later, her business still hasn’t gathered enough support to sustain itself, and although she led a successful culinary tour through Italy last October, she suffered a bad fall upon her return that has left her in a cervical collar for months. In light of these financial and physical setbacks, she’s decided to close her brick-and-mortar school in favor of activities that are still within the realm of her passion but have less overhead. She’s already assessing how she can “bloom where you’re planted,” which might mean a return to food writing and teaching, privately or online. Whatever future she chooses to prepare for, it begins with pruning what no longer serves her.

While some people build upon decades of experience to go even further in the same field, others pivot to another field entirely. Matt Witt, who spoke with me from his home in Talent in 2023, has been on one such path. After a career in community and union organizing—advocating for the likes of coal miners, sawmill workers, and schoolteachers—he shifted to nature photography and found community there, too. In his sixties, he was invited by a photographer known for his mentorship to join a photographers’ group that met monthly to share knowledge and inspiration—and his landscape and wildlife photos improved because of it. When he met a newer generation of community organizers involved in issues like affordable housing and climate change, he began using his new skills to support their efforts. After the Almeda Fire tore through the region, he partnered with local organizations to provide framed nature photos to three hundred residents of Talent and Phoenix who had lost everything, down to the art on their walls. 

If the central question of My Better Half is “How are people thriving in their later years?,” an underlying question might be “What do people require to keep thriving?” The answer is often “Each other.” Matt touched on that interdependence in a recent email exchange with me: “In nearly two decades of hiking and photographing in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon, I have been continually reminded that flowers generally do not bloom on their own. They often need pollinators like bees, butterflies, or birds. And so it is with people.” 

In her audio series The Late Bloomer, poet and scholar Clarissa Pinkola Estés explains a common trope in folklore—a character who has conformed so much to society that they’ve lost the ability to authentically bloom. Estés says these individuals are often aided by mentors, elders who urge them to “transgress, break the rules,” in order to recover the lost part of themselves.

This archetype reminds me of Pam Haunschild, who was a guest on my podcast in January 2023. A self-described “obedient child,” she adhered to her mother’s wishes instead of her own when she pursued a degree in finance rather than accept a scholarship to go to art school. After completing her life’s work in banking and academia, she retired at fifty-six; by age fifty-seven, she was taking a printmaking workshop in Carmel. The workshop reignited her original passion to create, and she experimented with several different art forms over the next couple of years, an exploratory period of trial and error that she thoroughly enjoyed. 

Pam is now a prolific nature and wildlife painter represented by galleries in Bandon and Ashland. Since returning to her first calling, she has been honored with key public commissions, like producing the playbill cover and poster art for the 2019 Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jacksonville, and designing and painting a native plant mural at Southern Oregon University. Today, years after picking up that lost thread of her young adulthood, she’s still evolving. “I do more teaching and mentoring now than I did ten years ago,” she said. “And there are different perspectives I am now taking in my own artwork … more abstraction, art series more linked to environmental topics and issues like how trees communicate with each other, and how king tides are a harbinger of overall sea level rises.” Recently, Pam’s painting Rooted was juried into the Watercolor Society of Oregon’s spring show at the Grants Pass Museum of Art.

Ninety-three-year-old Roy Sutton is a competitive sprinter from Ashland, who at the time of our interview last August was about to head to the 2024 Oregon Senior Games in Corvallis. The games are one of two main annual masters sports events in Oregon, along with the Hayward Classic in Eugene, and Roy has placed well in his age group at both of them. I first learned about Roy’s devotion to exercise when he ran past me in Ashland’s Lithia Park. Later, during our interview for My Better Half, I learned that aside from being an accomplished athlete, he is also an outspoken fitness activist. He showed me letters he’d written to news editors, asking why they cover high school and college sports but not senior games. He also hoped to promote the recommendation to get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise per week by establishing an informal “150 Club,” where people wear gear with that logo around town and recognize certain fitness values in each other. Knowing that lifestyle is now considered a greater determiner of longevity than genes, Roy attributes his high level of health to a lifelong commitment to regular exercise. Just this February, he came in a close third in the sixty-meter dash at the 2025 USA Track and Field Masters Indoor Championships in Florida.

Interviewing ninety-somethings reminds me of the optimism and commitment to growth I see in my own family, who live in Gold Hill. When my sister-in-law supposed at age forty-five that she was now “middle-aged,” my brother asked her, “Do you really want to limit yourself to ninety?” Being longevity-minded like this can make it feel worthwhile to start new projects and challenges. My mother graduated from Southern Oregon University at age fifty-six with a bachelor of arts in environmental science, and she became a certified fitness instructor for seniors this year, at seventy-five. I visited the class recently and found myself working out to a playlist I’ve seen her dancing to in her garden at home: Hozier, Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran, Stephen Sanchez. Meanwhile, my father played guitars in bands as a teen and young adult, then set performing aside as he started a lifelong career in building design and civil engineering. He eventually moved back home to care for his mother during the last few years of her life, and after she passed at the age of ninety-six, in 2017, he took up guitar again with all the discipline he’d invested in his design work. Living in his childhood home, this time in his seventies, chord posters and guitar racks reappeared on the wall. His homework this time around was following YouTube music lessons, practicing blues progressions, and improving his picking technique. 

Considering all the ways these interviewees—and my own family members—have demonstrated resilience, drive, and even physical prowess later in life, I wasn’t surprised to hear a statistic that came up in a recent interview I did with Debra Whitman. Debra is the chief public policy officer of AARP and the author of the book The Second Fifty: Answers to the 7 Big Questions of Midlife and Beyond. She has found that Americans over fifty are a boon to—not a drain on—the economy. This bodes well for Oregon, where in 2023, nearly one in four workers was fifty-five or older. 

But Debra reminds us that while enormous advances in longevity have been made since 1900, when the average American didn’t even make it to age fifty, large disparities still exist across gender, ethnicity, education, and income level. As she puts it, your zip code is now more important than your genetic code when it comes to health and longevity. According to her research, a person born today in Multnomah County can expect to live to eighty-nine; in Jackson County that number goes down to sixty-six, a twenty-three-year difference in life expectancy. She says, “People aren’t necessarily different in Multnomah versus Jackson County, right? We’re all humans. We have the potential to live longer lives.” 

Stories like the ones I’ve shared here have better outcomes when they take place within an age-friendly community, one that empowers people of all ages to stay active, connected, and able to contribute to its economic, social, and cultural life. In this framework, older adults are more likely to be hired or start a business. They can rely on quality health care, lifelong educational opportunities, reliable transportation, and safe outdoor spaces, as well as respect from their communities. According to Debra, both the public and private sector play a role in this kind of supportive ecosystem.

We can see Oregon lawmakers rising to this role as they grapple with an imminent, unprecedented demographic shift. By 2034, there will be more state residents over the age of sixty-five than under the age of eighteen. Older adults will make up 21 percent of the state population, and nearly half of those will be people of color. In February 2025, state legislators introduced a House bill that would establish a plan for healthy aging, coordinating the efforts of state agencies, nonprofit organizations, and community representatives.

The bill is one of several pro-aging initiatives in western states. I found Debra through the Stanford Center on Longevity’s Longevity Book Club, which offers virtual conversations with authors writing on the subject. In Washington state, where Debra grew up, the Northwest Center for Creative Aging advocates for the creativity, vitality, and wholeness inherent in all of us. The “About Us” page on their website could be describing the people featured on My Better Half, along with countless other still-blooming older adults: “As we age, we discover new capacities and new interests,” it reads. “We seek activities that expand our minds, strengthen our bodies, and open our hearts. We recognize the necessity of interdependence, humor, generosity, and gratitude to bolster us during challenging times.” 

As I first learned from reading Fifty on Fifty, it can be an inspiring, even fascinating, process to watch people collect certain laurels without any desire to rest on them, to see them feel the length of their lives so far and ask, “Now, what’s next?” It’s not that these cases are necessarily extraordinary; it’s that they show us how late-in-life flourishing can become ordinary. When our very bone cells regenerate every ten years, it’s reasonable that a forty-, sixty-, or ninety-year-old would seriously consider what untapped excellence they might still contain, and what pleasures life can still yield to them. There are many instances of our fellow Oregonians’ drive to bloom, whether they are overcoming injuries to become even stronger, reviving a neglected passion, or charting a completely new course. Our success in these endeavors depends partly upon a synergy between the individual and the systems we find ourselves in: being supported by the environment, then contributing the fruit of our labor back to it. If we can continue to root out the internal ageism that would prevent a growth mindset, and if we can design policies that create age-friendly habitats in which to thrive, older adults may increasingly be limited only by their interests and imagination. 

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