A Great Old Age
Ninety, not at all out. Diana Dekker talks to two vital women in the country’s fastest-growing age group.
——————–
SLUNG over a chair is Isabel McIlraith’s faded blue straw hat with a swathe of pink ribbon around it. She uses it for gardening and she’s had it on while she picked the tiny pink roses, daisies and scented leaves for the tussie mussie she put together just an hour ago. She is the author of a book about such posies.
The whole of Mrs McIlraith’s house has a pink glow and a slightly faded air. It’s a problem, the way the sun fades everything in Eastbourne. She has specially noticed how much the large, beautiful piece of embroidery on a stool is beginning to lose its colour.
“But then, I suppose it’s not surprising. I did it when I was 20.”
The embroidery is nearly 80 years old. Mrs McIlraith is heading for 99. She is one of almost 18,000 New Zealanders in their 90s, an increase of more than 66 per cent in one year, the biggest of any age-group.
Women nonagenarians — there are 13,290 of them — outnumber men in their age bracket by almost three to one. By the time they reach 100 they outnumber men by four to one — there are 400 women centenarians and 110 men.
With the baby boomers coming on, says Victoria University associate professor Judith Davey, director for the New Zealand Institute for Research on Aging, it’s a matter of “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Women such as Mrs McIlraith, and Katharine Robson, 93, who lives a full life in Khandallah, are, through good genes and good management, the lucky ones. Psycho-geriatrician for Wairarapa District Health Board Dr Anthony Duncan says 40 per cent of people at 90 have significant dementia. If the “old-old” population increases as predicted there will, he says, be an explosion of dementia.
How have women such as Mrs McIlraith and Mrs Robson lived to such a great age with such obvious enjoyment?
Mrs McIlraith, at 98, takes no medication and lives in her own home with its fringe of windows overlooking her full-blown summer garden, with which, these days, she has a few hours of help each week. She qualifies for help in her house, too — “the bathrooms, the vacuuming, that sort of thing”.
Today she wears big pink beads and rosebud earrings with her checked shirt. She and her house and her garden are like a living watercolour painting. She wouldn’t like to go in to an old people’s home, she confides, and has been told she won’t have to “which is comforting”.
She cooks for herself, three good meals a day, a skill she learned during a home science course at what was Dunedin Technical College more than three quarters of a century ago. Tonight she might cook some spaghetti and tomatoes and add a little cheese with chives and parsley from her garden. No meat, but she eats it.
“I’ve heard people say you don’t need meat or this and that but I think you need a little bit of everything. It keeps you well, doesn’t it. I look after myself in every way. Most of it is plain commonsense.” She has a glass of wine with dinner “nearly every night. I think they go together.
“All things in moderation. Life, up to a point, is what you make it.”
She agrees she has a positive attitude. She has never, in all the years she has been in Eastbourne, she claims, heard two people being unpleasant to one another.
“A positive attitude — I have got that. I do know you don’t get anywhere without it.”
And a sharp mind?
“Instead of sharp I hope it’s kind. Or you could put quick and kind.”
Mrs McIlraith has been on her own for 15 years. She and her husband had no children — “I’d have liked to have had six” — but she has many friends. She embroiders, reads and gardens, and would continue her travels tomorrow if the doctor wasn’t putting his foot down about her going alone. She has travelled widely and went to Pakistan in her 80s.
She has never driven and walks the few blocks to the village, using a stick after damaging one of her legs. Sometimes someone drives her there to shop.
“I’m a very lucky person head to foot, except for my legs.”
People tell her they think she is “amazing at my age.
“Age — and I say that humbly — has nothing to do with it. It’s what one does with one’s life that is important.”
Mrs Robson, too, keeps her mind active doing cryptic crosswords – - “you need a lot of lateral thinking” — and reading. She’s currently reading Anne Salmond’s latest book, The Wakefields and the Trial of the Cannibal Dog.
“She’s an excellent writer and a good historian. It’s a fat book and you don’t read it in a great big gulp.”
She regularly goes, with friends or neighbours, to hear the NZ Symphony Orchestra or chamber music or to ballet or the theatre. She goes to university extension lectures if something interests her. The last one was on Alexander the Great.”
She still has a driver’s licence but is giving driving up after 75 years. “My eyesight’s not really good enough. I’ve also given up the idea of climbing Mt Cook. You gradually do give up things. I used to wallpaper and paint and help with the concreting. I think you do become more sedentary.”
She has help in the house, where her arthritis makes vacuuming difficult, and with her flourishing vegetable garden.
“I’ve always had a good diet. My father was keen on virgin vegetables and wholemeal.”
She has four children, none in Wellington, and has been alone since her husband, who had dementia in his last years, died in 1993.
“It would be good if they found a cure for dementia, or a preventative,” she says. “It’s distressing for the people who have it and the people around. I coped with my husband but I finally had to give up.”
She ascribes longevity to “a mixture of many factors”, long- lived ancestors for one. Her grandparents lived in to their 90s and her mother till her late 80s. Her father, who had rheumatic fever as a child, lived till his late 70s. Like Mrs McIlraith she has a varied diet, enjoys food and is not overweight. “It’s your own choice as to how much you eat.
“I seem to be always busy but I do go slowly.” She’s currently knitting a complex Aran jersey for her 57-year-old son in Canada. “I knitted one for him 10 years ago and it’s nearly worn out. I thought I should do another one.”
Mrs Robson did a science degree at Victoria University and was a secondary school teacher for much of her life, till she retired at 63.
“Goodness me,” she says, “I’ve been retired for 30 years.”
In that time she has done “all sorts of things I didn’t have time for, including weaving and spinning.” Each year, till this year, she has travelled to Canada and England to see her children.
She is quite happy with her own company. “Too bad if I wasn’t. Sometimes you feel it would be nice to have someone else in the house to talk to. Other times you realise it’s good not to have to consider someone else about when you sleep or eat or go out. It cuts both ways.”
MRS McILRAITH and Mrs Robson are mentally alert, but most 90- year-olds, even with dementia, live in their own homes these days, says Dr Duncan. They go in to care at the point where complications and behaviour from dementia exceed an ability to cope at home, their comfort zone.
“If you try and force someone into care when they don’t want to be there it’s risky. Most people with dementia don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. They don’t want to go in to care. There is an argument that it’s better to do it when there are earlier signs of dementia but most say there is nothing wrong.”
Old age, he says, “is a very recent invention. There didn’t used to be old people”.
Dr Davey says the increase of people in their 90s is no surprise. “We knew it was going to happen.” People who live to 65, past the most dangerous ages for heart disease and cancer, tend to live longer, not just because of improved medical care but improved lifestyle, clean water and warmer houses.
With the looming numerical increase in the very elderly from baby boomers, and if Government policy encourages them to age “in place”, comes challenge.
“How do we ensure very old people live in the community safely and comfortably and independently. There’s no use waiting for the 600 per cent increase in people over 85 projected between 2000 and 2051.”
Much residential care is closing, she says, and voluntary agencies are backing out of it. Intermittent housing might be needed and supported living units near a hospital or resthome. Existing houses may need adaptation.
“If you have an accident ACC will pay to have ramps fitted but if you’re old and arthritic that’s not covered by ACC.
“How do we deliver services when homecare workers are lowly paid and difficult to recruit? Where are they going to come from? What part should families play? It’s not a crisis unless we don’t plan for it.”
——————–