Aging With Grace: Successful Aging as Told by Linda Campbell

To Linda Campbell, my 75-year-old grandmother, successful aging is one with purpose. As we met via zoom, she advised me to find my “why”, telling me that in my young adulthood to make conscious efforts now so that I can in her words, set myself up to “age gracefully”. Authors Rowe and Kahn offer their definition of successful aging composed of “low probability of disease and disease-related disability, high cognitive and physical functional capacity, and active engagement with life”(Rowe and Khan 1997, 433), and for Linda, this definition is precise. Before I offered her Rowe and Khan’s perspective Linda describes her criteria of successful aging to be “getting old, which is wonderful, but getting old gracefully. Getting old and not needing a lot of medication -getting old without having to have a lot of aches and pains. Getting old and still being able to do things for yourself and not have other people do things for you.” These sentiments greatly mirror the definition Rowe and Khan put forth for successful aging. Both Rowe, Khan, and Linda’s descriptions of successful aging suggest the work of the individual to be paramount in how one will experience old age.

As described in Rowe and Khan’s 1997 paper Bandur defines, self-efficacy as “people’s beliefs in their capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to deal with prospective situations" (Bandura, 1995). To Linda, her own perceived self-efficacy was developed after observing the way older people in her neighborhood of Lamarque, Texas acted in old age. She notes that “it seemed like at a certain age, you know, [the older people around her growing up] say I'm old. I'm not going to be able to do that anymore. They just start sitting back, standing around the house and not doing anything. Once that goes away, then so does the mind go. You're cognizant because if you're out and about getting around your mind is going to be thinking, looking at things.” This observation motivated Linda to actively chose to stay active, believing that self-efficacy is the key to staying engaged with life in old age.

Seeing the way the elderly people in her own life were restricted in ability, Linda then tells me that her choice to have children at a younger age and stay active was in part, to ensure that as she aged, she was able to be present and active in her grandchildren's life. “I wanted [t]o make sure that I would be able to enjoy my grandchildren, to do things with them, you know, and not just sit back and look at them…to make sure that I kept that type of lifestyle going “. Because of this choice, Linda’s perspective of aging has prioritized the maintenance of physical capacity to be present for her family and making individual choices to prepare her aging self for success.

Additionally, activity was a common theme throughout this interview. Participating in tennis and softball in her younger years, a marathon runner and camp gladiator participant throughout her middle ages, and now an instructor of seated aerobics, Linda speaks to how diet and exercise is beneficial for eliminating health risks that she and her peers are conscious of. She notices a trend in longer life expectancy, but she notes that oftentimes activity and diet are being neglected, and instead people are relying on medication. “A lot of us are still living a lot longer, but a lot of us are not still real active. We're living longer because of medication and not because of our activity, what we're doing in our life, taking care of ourselves, moving, and eating the right type of food.” To Linda, physical exercise is not only a way to minimize some of the health risks she sees her peers suffer from, but she also sees physical exercise as a set of actions she can take as an individual, to keep her from being dependent on medicine.

Rowe and Khan’s model emphasizes that continued engagement with life is one of the key tenets to successful aging, specifically showing us how “[s]ocial support, both emotional and instrumental, can have positive health-relevant effects.” (Rowe and Khan 1997, 438). Linda’s exercise practices not only support physical wellbeing, but they are also a testament to how social support can be extremely beneficial to her older years. Moving from Fort Worth to Houston, Linda was able to find community in the members of her new church, a group of older ladies who all shared similar comments about their weight, limited mobility, and level of activity. She recalled how she began this program saying, “We'd go eat and I’m listening to them say: I'm too fat, I need to lose some weight. I need to do this, so I said what do you think about chair exercise...it's not anything that's going to be strenuous, that's going to put pressure on your knees or anything like that, and then they thought about it and then they were excited.” This community that Linda found has been a source of activity and active engagement with life by expanding her social circle to create a source of strength and resilience following the unexpected passing of her husband, my grandfather.

The authors of this paper speak of resiliency “to describe the rapidity and completeness with which people recover from such episodes and return to meeting the criteria of success.” (Rowe and Kahn 1997, 439). Linda’s resiliency comes from her lifelong commitment to activity through exercise, by being an active grandmother to three grandchildren, by creating spaces in which she can not only offer but also receive social support, and her deeper level of introspection that has prepared her for stressful life events by maintaining a sense of purpose. While during the course of this interview, I was the one who offered question after question for my grandmother to answer, at the close of our session she flipped the script and asked me a question saying, “What is your why? With this question she asked me to determine my purpose and develop a framework that will inspire me to make individual choices to navigate through the stressful conditions of life with the resiliency to age successfully.