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I am grateful that this feeling of becoming whole occurred later in life, when I could experience it consciously. Now that we’re living longer, being a late bloomer has a lot of advantages. Maybe some people are intact spirits from the beginning, and maybe it happens to others in early life. But it’s glorious to be at an age when you are aware that it’s happening, that you worked for it, and that you’re on the right path. For the first time as an adult, I was without a man in my life yet felt whole, rather than like a half a person waiting to be completed.

I was going through what Gail Sheehy in
Sex and the Seasoned Woman
calls the passage “from pleasing to mastery.”
⁸
This time can be the hallmark of our Third Acts, the mirror opposite of our first major life transition, in adolescence, which sent us careening from mastery to pleasing, turning us from, as I have heard Gloria Steinem say, “a confident child who’s been climbing trees and saying, ‘It’s not fair,’ into a self-doubting teenager who prefaces her thoughts with ‘It’s probably only me but …’ ”

Before now, most of us have been defined by others—our husbands, our children, our parents, our jobs. Now the time comes when we can begin to define ourselves. I knew I was ready, I just didn’t know what form the definition would take.

This was not my first fertile void, and I knew what to do: nothing. For a couple of months I raked the leaves in my daughter’s yard, and friends came to see me. I found refuge in a black Baptist church (until the press followed me there), where the soulful preaching and stirring gospel singing lifted my spirit. I went to occasional meetings of the organization I had founded seven years earlier, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. I listened to classical music and read books by the psychologists Carol Gilligan and Marion Woodman. I prayed regularly, dabbled in meditation, made a point of breathing deeply, and waited for the wind to take me, this time with my sails fully hoisted.

This time it was Oprah Winfrey who sailed into my harbor. She’d come to interview me for the second issue of her just-launched magazine,
O.
Clearly, my digs weren’t what she’d expected, as she pulled up in a stretch limousine, totally incongruous in that neighborhood. “Gee, didn’t Ted buy you a swank condo?” she asked, bewildered, as she walked into the modest living room. “He probably would have if I’d asked, but I didn’t. I like it here,” I explained, “I’m starting over.” In that interview I told Oprah about preparing for my Third Act and what that felt like, and, in verbalizing it, I saw clearly the gendered theme that ran through my life: the need to please, to leave myself behind so as to be loved, the feelings of never being good enough, the difficulty with “no.” As I thought about it more in the ensuing days, I was struck by how crystal clear my thinking was. New ideas came to me, but not because I was trying to figure something out; they just appeared.

With Oprah, the day she came and interviewed me in my daughter’s Atlanta home, just after Ted Turner and I split up.
RICHARD PHIBBS/ART DEPT

True ideas have always seemed to ambush me when I least expect them. Just when I’m meandering along, paying no heed to my flanks and rear, a true idea will float out of the sky, hit me on top of my head, and change the color of my life. And one of those true things was the idea to write
My Life So Far.
There it was. So simple. This is what I would do and how I would figure out my next decades. My life hasn’t been a representative one, but I was sure the themes that ran through it were universal enough to resonate with others and that if I could write it deeply, below the surface it could provide a road map for others. This would be for them and for me—a deeper, fuller life review than what I had put together for my sixtieth birthday. One that would help me—not to grow old but to grow into myself, and into Act 111.

CHAPTER 5

Eleven Ingredients for Successful Aging

Whether we live to a vigorous old age lies not so much in our stars or our genes as in ourselves.

—GEORGE VAILLANT
¹

My fish.

W
OODY ALLEN ONCE SAID, “I DON’T WANT TO ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY through my work. I’d rather achieve it by not dying.” Sorry about that, Woody. It doesn’t appear that science will ever change that reality of human life. (Though in Appendix I you will learn what is being done in that arena.) What’s needed, therefore, when it comes to issues of physical aging, is a shift in thinking, from a focus on life span or life expectancy to a focus on health span or health expectancy … getting to the end in better shape, since we cannot change the end itself!

Earlier, I described the old paradigm of physical aging as an arch. Now there is a new metaphor for successful physical aging that focuses less on decline. This is the one that we can strive for. It is life as a rectangle—the top half of a rectangle, that is. We’re born; then we live a long, level, and healthy stretch of time. No rise and then a slow, gradual decline. Rather, there is a steep, sudden drop-off at the far end, right before we go.

This rectangular metaphor for physical aging is the new goal.

Dr. Tom Kirkwood came up with a term for this drop-off at the end of the rectangle: the “compression of morbidity.” “We want to squeeze the bad things that happen to us at the end of life into as short a period as possible while leaving the life span as it is,” says Kirkwood, who is a professor of medicine and the head of the Department of Gerontology at the University of Newcastle.
²

The Eleven Ingredients

There are eleven ingredients that can help us age successfully—physically, emotionally, and psychologically. All of them are within our power to do something about. Listed below, they reflect the findings from a number of important studies and books, most notably the MacArthur Foundation Study of Successful Aging, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and the writings of Dr. Robert Butler, the late president and CEO of the International Longevity Center in New York. Some of these ideas were given to me by the experts I interviewed, and in the following chapters I discuss each of them, with illustrative stories from the lives of my friends and from my own life.

1. NOT ABUSING ALCOHOL

Never having abused alcohol is considered by some gerontologists to be
the single highest predictor of successful aging.
In his book
Aging Well,
Dr. George Vaillant defines “alcohol abuse” (rather than simply “reported alcohol consumption”) as “the evidence of multiple alcohol-related problems (with spouse, family, employer, law, or health) and/or evidence of alcohol-related dependence.”
³
He goes on to say that “alcohol abuse is a cause rather than a result of increased life stress, of depression.”

2. NOT SMOKING

Never having smoked or stopping at a relatively young age is another major predictor of healthy aging. According to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, “If a man had stopped smoking by about age 45, the effects of smoking (more than a pack a day for 20 years) could at 70 or 80 no longer be discerned.”
⁴

As critical as these first two points are, I have not elaborated on them because I feel they are self-evident.

3. GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP

My father always told me that you need less sleep as you get older. Well, Dad, I’m still waiting! On average, I get eight or nine hours of sleep every night and, frankly, I don’t do well on less. I rarely feel stress if I’ve slept enough. Perhaps that’s because sleep is one of the best remedies for stress.

Unfortunately, Dad was right in one way: As you get older, your sleep lightens progressively. Many older people say they spend more time in bed but sleep less; when they do sleep, it’s what is called “dream sleep,” as opposed to deep sleep. Deep sleep is important throughout the life span, but it is essential when we are older, when our tissues need replenishing yet our human growth hormone and testosterone levels are diminished. When we are in a state of deep sleep, there is a surge of growth hormone. This is important for the restoration of our body’s tissues, especially the tissues of the heart. Regular exercise, by the way, is a wonderful way to develop your ability to sleep more deeply.

If you are sleep challenged, try not to drink coffee or caffeinated tea or sodas after lunch—duh! Better yet, do away with all of it, except perhaps one cup in the morning. At night, try eating foods that contain natural tryptophan—milk, turkey, and complex carbohydrates.

4. BEING PHYSICALLY ACTIVE

I have a lot to say about this point. Maintaining a healthy weight, a strong heart, and strong bones through regular physical activity is a major ingredient in the recipe for successful aging. And what is truly good news is that even if you first start to incorporate exercise into your life after age sixty, you can reverse many of the problems associated with inactivity, and you will feel so much better. That in itself should be an inspiration to keep you moving! The next chapter, “The Workout,” goes into detail about this, as do Appendixes II and III.

ANNA-MAREE HARMAN,
[email protected]