Introducing a wise woman who approached her own extreme old age as an ongoing project. Eventually, she saw herself as a sturdy centenarian, even though she was frail. She developed a systematic method for dealing with the ever-increasing age-related changes in her body, mind and life. She was learning how to be old, and she blogged about it every week for 5 years. To her surprise, she found that facing old age honestly and openly was satisfying, even exciting. So today on this podcast I will read from the book-of-the-blog, and riff about it. I will do this again, because I am over-enthusiastic about Doris Carnevali's work.

• 2m 30s Introducing the sturdy centenarian
• 7m Birth of a blog
• 10m 10s Turning 95
• 13m Learning from these chapters
• 15m Highly engaged listeners
• 16m 20s Comments from readers

Contact and links

• Comment on my website: scroll down to the Comments section.
• Email me: rachel at writing dot co dot nz
• Facebook: Rachel McAlpine, Learning How To Be Old
• Happy 100th birthday, Doris!

Transcript for Learning from a Centenarian

[Music] Hello, I'm Rachel McAlpine, I'm 84 and I'm learning how to be old. And for some years, one of my most important teachers has been Mrs Doris Carnevali. I've never met her, although we have exchanged quite a lot of emails. Now Doris was an Associate Professor Emeritus at Washington University School of Nursing in Seattle and from the age of 95, she blogged pretty much every week about her personal experience of aging. I learned so much from Mrs Carnevali that I wrote a book based on her blog. She carried on blogging till she was a 100-year-old blogger! is a rarity by which time she perceived herself as frail in some ways and sturdy in other ways. So I called my book The Sturdy Centenarian.Sometimes I won't have a guest on this podcast and instead I'm going to just read you something from this book, The Sturdy Centenarian. I'm sure I'll interrupt myself sometimes to make my own comments on the book to be realistic. I won't be able to stop myself because, well, Doris always gets me thinking and I know you're out there. So I want to share my thoughts with you. (If only you could share your thoughts back. You could do that on my Facebook page, Rachel McAlpine Learning How to Be Old.)Anyway, I boiled the blog down to about half and I included about exactly 116 entries. Let's call them chapters. Hey, they might be good bedtime stories. Maybe I should try and read in a low, soporific voice that will send you to sleep. Maybe not. We'll see. OK, off we go.The Sturdy Centenarian, Aging and Thriving with Doris Carnevali, edited by Rachel McAlpine. This is the introduction.Meet the Sturdy Centenarian. When I discovered Doris Carnevali’s blog, I was 78 and she was 96. There I found answers to some massive questions about extreme old age that I had never even thought about. How do you bake cookies when you're a walker? How do you maintain your self-esteem? Is old age really a state of stagnation? How do you build new relationships? How do you establish your credibility? How do you tackle the mounting impact of old age on your daily life? Why is it better to use neutral language when you talk about aging? Or how can a failing brain mitigate the impact of a failing brain? Can you thrive even when you are frail? What are the pleasures of extreme old age, if any?Doris Carnevali used to be a professor at the Washington University School of Nursing and co-author of a textbook on nursing geriatric patients. Then she herself became an explorer, a resident and a reporter in that mysterious country, old age. Central to her story is a system she has developed for coping with the relentless advance of normal age-related changes. She calls this engaging with aging or EWA. Her system attracted attention from academics and carers but her blog is primarily for those who worry about their own old age and those concerned about elderly relatives.When I stumbled across the blog it had 86 followers and I immediately wanted to make her work more widely known. And Mrs Carnevali very generously agreed to this. For this I'm deeply grateful any misinterpretations are mine alone and I apologize for them sincerely.This is the result. Her own brilliant writing condensed into a book. I've selected and edited 116 posts and as an experiment in solidarity illustrated some using my non-dominant hand. The drawings are intended to resemble me, not the beautiful and elegant Mrs Carnevali.There's no escape. If we're to live a long life, even a healthy long life, our body, brain and spirit will inevitably change. In extreme old age older mentors are extremely rare. In Mrs Carnevali we find a role model, cheerleader and guide for our ultimate developmental tasks. Those of very old age. No wonder so many of her readers express a sense of relief. She is not the only centenarian who can encourage those facing old age with fear, denial or despair. But as far as I know she's the only one who shines a light on everyday life in extreme old age and shows us a positive way to deal with the challenges. Rachel McAlpine May 2023So that was the introduction. Now I'm reading the words of Doris herself from the blog.

The sturdy centenarian at 95, birth of a blog.Necessity is the mother of invention.When one door shuts another one opens.Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.Never name the well from which you will not drink.

Number one. Chapter one, we'll call them chapters, right? Why blog?I am a 95 year old woman who was coasting along with the flow of life and then one day thought, I wonder what difference it would make if I were to engage actively with the process of aging. Scrutinize the parts of it, interact with it differently. And that's just what I began to do.I called this new process of scrutiny and response, engaging with aging. And it began to add zest, intrigue and comedy to life. (There are times when aging is just plain ludicrous).I had already had a long career in nursing and had also co-authored three editions of a textbook, Nursing Management for the Elderly. This gave me a gritty practical education on aging, normal and otherwise. Consequently I had the both the advantage and the burden of knowing what aging would surely bring … and what it might bring in my advancing years. Or rather, thinking that I knew. Because until I became old myself, I didn't know the half of it.Then someone challenged me to start a blog. And since then I've written something for the blog almost every week.One more piece of background. I've been remarkably healthy and I've lived alone for the last 12 years in a home my husband built 68 years ago. I have the active support of two sons and their families. I'm white from a Swedish background living in Seattle. In other words I'm privileged. However from my nursing experience I have some idea what daily living is like for those who are not so fortunate.I'm not a scientist although I do consult the literature at times. This blog will consist of my ideas, discoveries and strategies as I explore this business of living with my own aging. They will show some ways one person lives with aging and being old but certainly not the only way.Chapter 2 Turning 95I'd never ever thought about being 95. Never expected to live this long. Never aspired to it. Somehow it just happened. One mid-January day there it was. This was the first birthday when I refused a party. Much to my family's dismay. I wanted to spend the day at home alone getting used to the idea. Not sad, not happy, just a bit bemused.Well, now I've had eight months to get used to being 95. Actually it's quite fine. With that landmark birthday behind me, I find myself feeling remarkably free to get on with my life. Sometimes I use the 95 as an excuse to avoid things I don't want to do. That's legitimate.Surprising me too are vistas of life in earlier decades arising in my thoughts. They seem to be from a 95 year old's distant perspective. They intrigue me. They invite exploration. I find myself not just wanting to examine them but to engage with them. That's new.In my professional life I wrote a lot for academic publications. The transition to writing for a general audience has not been easy, but as one of my professors once said, as long as you're green, you're growing.So here I am, green and growing. Homeschooling myself in writing non-academic blog posts about my personal experience of growing old. And explaining how I moved from just getting older to actually engaging with this aging process. How I examine what's happening to me and figure how to deal with it. Who knew there were new adventures in store for someone as old as me?[Music] Okay so that's how Doris began her blog. Um and I'm, look I have to talk about it, forgive me if I get a bit over-enthusiastic but I'm an awe of her.Why blog? Indeed, she asks. Well, she did get technical help from her granddaughter but still — blogging! She’d never done that before. Even just writing something new every week, that's a completely new sort of project. As she said she found it extremely hard to switch from writing academic pros for an academic audience to a personal , less formal style for a non-academic audience, a general audience. I think you can still hear the professor in there but she's a professor talking in a small room, not in a lecture hall. Yeah.Um, well, she had a very strong reason to blog. It was a burning desire to up people's knowledge of extreme old age from the inside and to show them that, in her words, it's not such a bad rap. She wanted to get out of the nursing bubble and out of the academic bubble and reach ordinary people who are struggling with their aging bodies and minds or perhaps watching their parents do the same thing or possibly caring for people who were struggling. You know, without that passion Doris Carnevali’s blog would have fizzled out after a few weeks like most do you know. It's pretty unusual for someone to carry on blogging about anything for five complete years. I mean it faded a little bit towards the end but most of the time she was blogging every single week. Yeah.Now as I said, when I first discovered her blog it only had 84 followers. But what followers! It was so bizarre because every post had multiple comments despite the fact that Mrs Carnevali never answered them. Maybe she answered about twice in five years but, even without any response, there were readers who hung on to every word.I think what's more remarkable still (considering she was just writing about one subject the whole time) right at the end after five years she was still coming up sometimes with completely new ideas. Just an amazing woman.Well, if she asked herself, Why blog? here's another question: Why book? Why did I take the complete blog, cut it down by half, massage and curate and edit it into an easy-to-read book for the general public? Most of my friends and family think that was pretty weird. What's the point? they said. I don't know what do you think? I couldn't help myself.I'm going to read you comments from the first two weeks of this blog. Oh but first I hope you noticed one very important paragraph where Doris points out that she is a privileged white woman. It's something I struggle with a little bit because it's so tempting to think that we can all have a lovely, healthy, happy old age like Doris, entirely through our own efforts. To ignore all those factors, the ones that are out of our control. You know, political, socio-economic, environmental factors that have a big part in determining the quality of our old age, whether it's good or bad. These things are out of our control.I just got lucky and so did Doris. And Doris knows she's got a head start with her own home, an education, good support network, family and friends. So do I, maybe you do too. But you know that's not the same for everyone. That's kind of a background to the entire blog and for that matter, to my own podcast.CommentsSo, comments. I'm going to read out the comments. They built up over time but I can read quite a lot of them for the very first two blog posts. I mean, it's like a dream for most bloggers or podcasters for that matter, to get like 10 comments for the first two times you ever publish something. But that happened to Doris. Here we go.First one. "I am so looking forward to learning more about engaging with aging. The title drew me in because it sounds like a wonderfully offensive rather than a defensive way to approach aging."You notice these comments are not just 'oh good work thank you' or 'I like that' but these are readers who are really taking the whole thing in. It's interesting to me.Here's another one. If we can look at our aging journey and be more amused than angry I'm all for it. Right here's another one. "Good read for aging baby boomers as we enter the next chapter of life. Thank you.""Doris you are an inspiration. Brie, almost 10, enjoyed pieces we read tonight. Thank you for sharing." That's not what you expect is it? That a 10-year-old enjoyed that blog. Probably enjoyed listening to something with her grand-mother."Doris, may we use parts of your blog in our senior newsletter?" Get that quite often."Just found your blog. I'm very grateful to have done so. You are certainly an inspiration. At 84 I'm always looking for such as this blog of yours."Yeah, it's very risky to say something is unique but by the time I found this blog, I'd been looking and looking and looking and looking all over the world for all the blogs and articles and social media stuff about aging and I had never struck anything like Doris. So that's why I learned from her."I'm intrigued by your comment, 'I moved from just aging to actually engaging with this aging process' and I'd love to hear more about this transition. At 71, I'm definitely aging. Having worked in geriatrics for many years, I know I want to be engaged in life to the end — but engaged with the aging process? I'm not sure that is the same thing."Oh maybe that was too many comments. You’ve got your own ideas but here's what I learned from them. No doubt many people, lots of people, find the very idea of old age boring at best. But the comments tell me that other people are hungry for some kind of inside information, a report from the front. And that's the very reason why I'm doing this podcast. Fancy that. Your ideas for topics will be welcome.Okay that's all for today please share this centenarian's words with your parents or your adult children. Back soon, bye for now. (upbeat music)

POSTSCRIPT

Her blog has also been converted by her friend Gretha Cammermeyer into a ring-bound A4 manual in two volumes, practical for nurses.