[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: You're listening to KFAI on 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and streaming live on the
[email protected] I'm Josh and welcome to Right on Radio.
On this hour, Liz Olds will be in discussion with Andrea Jalotz talking about her new book, radical Growing Old in an age of longevity, enlightening and deeply moving, alive to the sadness and joy of time passing. Radical Endurance is a guide and a companion through the experience of growing old, as well as an unconventional coming of age story celebrating a new stage of life when we need the most. All this and more. So stay tuned to WRITE ON radio.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: We're going to be talking tonight with Andrea Gillott about her book Radical Endurance. Welcome to WRITE ON radio.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: I want to talk first about the title specifically. I've heard of Radical Acceptance of the DBT World, and I'm wondering if this had anything to do with that or if you came up with this from your fresh perspective about aging.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: I came up with the title Radical Endurance because the word I had in mind was endurance. If we live into old age, we have endured many, many decades of life. It seemed to me that by the time you get to about 75 or so, that's radical endurance. It really didn't have anything to do with the concept of radical acceptance. In fact, until you mentioned that, I wasn't familiar with it.
So Radical was a kind of creation to kind of honor that what it takes to get that far in life.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
And what prompted you to write this book? You've said some already, but if you could go a little deeper, that would be great.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: I had been following, I had worked my work at the University of Minnesota, where I worked, creating lifelong learning programs at the University of Minnesota for over three decades. And during the last decade of my work there, I was asked to work on programs that would serve older adults.
And so this was kind of the this would have this was in the early 2000s, and it was a time when baby boomers were just beginning to hit age 65 and older. So there was a lot of media attention on getting older, a lot about how baby boomers would begin to retire and then what would they do with themselves. So there was a lot of interest in thinking about kind of reinventing aging in order to accommodate the fact that we were now living much longer lives.
So I was lucky enough to get involved to partner with a family physician who had been working researching physician burnout and what late career physicians were facing. So there was A kind of a match there of concerns. So we put together a program called Encore Transitions, preparing for post career life.
And it was breaking new ground because it wasn't just about finances. It was a holistic look at who you might become after your career life was over once you were past all of the complications of young adulthood and midlife.
And that work with him really opened my eyes to a deeper, more holistic understanding of what it really means to grow old and to be old, to live a vital life in old age. What I one thing I learned was that old age is a period of life that nowadays can last 10 to 20 years. It can last almost as long as midlife.
So we need to be prepared to be whole people during that final time of life.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Were these ideas you talk about having a leap of consciousness. Were these ideas a part of your leap of consciousness?
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. Thank you, Liz, for mentioning that I had a leap of consciousness when I shortly this happened shortly before my 75th birthday. And if, if you'd like, I'll read a little bit about that.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:11] Speaker C: Where one morning I woke up and I realized that in a few weeks I would no longer be what people called an older woman. I would be an old woman.
And that was a leap of consciousness for me.
So if you'd like, let me read to you just a bit about that from Radical Endurance.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:34] Speaker C: This brief excerpt that I want to read to you. I'm just going to sip my water for a minute. Thank you, listeners. This brief excerpt I'm going to excerpt. I'm going to read to you happened in May of 2020. So during the throes of the pandemic several days earlier, I had had a televisit with my primary care doctor. And we had been talking about all the things, all the appointments and things I had coming up. I had my tests and blood draws and mammograms and this and that, and wondering what should we do about all things, all these things. And we decided together that we should revisit them in about three months with when, with a little bit of luck, this pandemic thing would be over. So this is where the excerpt picks up. This is a Tuesday morning in May. Having had my fill of the news, I decided to visit my online health chart to review my doctor's notes from our visit. I wanted to clarify whether I was supposed to schedule an appointment for three months hence. I logged in, found my chart, opened the doctor's progress notes and read the first sentence, and I quote, andrea Gillitz is a 74 year old female who presents at that age. What?
Instantly I reacted to what the sentence could have said but did not quote. Andrea Gillitz is a 74 year old female who presents at a much younger age. I felt bemused and slightly hurt. I had never thought of myself as the picture of pink cheek vitality, but I had always thought of myself as presenting younger than my chronological age. In fact, I believed that my own mother had actually told me as much when I was middle aged. She presents at that age. I felt a think coming on. Then, in the split second it takes for puzzlement to become rumination, a shockwave of emotion shot through me. Imagine that in an instant of inattention, you walk half a step too far on the slippery rock floor at the head of Niagara Falls and at the moment the edge betrays you, you are swept 167ft downward by the fury of the great waterfall. Miraculously, you land alive, but you are forever altered. In a tumble down Niagara Falls, in a stumble down an invisible rabbit hole, in what I can only call an astonishing leap of consciousness, I saw that I was about to descend from older woman to old woman. A self protective myth was about to give way to reality. In only nine more Tuesdays, I would no longer be a 74 year old woman who presents at that age. I would be a 75 year old woman. And heaven only knew at what age I would present for the first time. There would be no second chances after mistakes or misfortune. There would be no more opportunities to try to get it right. I had spent my entire life trying to get it right, whatever it happened to be. But now I was face to face with elemental vagaries. For what would I strive toward? What would I work? Who would I become?
The life I had lived over my lifetime was coming to what felt like a screeching end. But once my mind settled down, I began to understand that in its place a new way of living would have to emerge. One in which striving and working would no longer define me.
I felt all at once the terror of finality, but a faint sense of relief also of movement toward peace of mind.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you.
We're speaking to Andrea Gullet.
[00:09:51] Speaker C: Thank you, Liz.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: I'm trying to get it right.
Author of Radical Endurance. A great book about aging. A book of essays about aging. I'm wondering. You know, it's funny, I think this fits in right here. You became a yoga teacher at a.
[00:10:11] Speaker C: Yes, I did.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Talk about how you came upon being a yoga teacher and what your goals were. Once you became a yoga teacher.
[00:10:22] Speaker C: I.
My husband died way too young. Cancer. He was only 52. And after that loss, I fell into what is called prolonged grief disorder. It is grief that lasts too long. In other words, longer than is culturally normal for your culture.
And it's debilitating. You get stuck in it, you can't move on from it. And so for several years I suffered through that.
Finally, the light began to break for me about nine years after my husband died, when I finally sold the house that we lived in and bought a small condo here, just on the river, which is behind me.
On radio, you can't see it, but it's there, the Mississippi here, downtown St. Paul. And it was a brand new building and it had, under the same roof as the condominiums here, a gym.
And in the spring after I moved in, I moved in in the fall of 2007. And in the spring of 2008, the gym offered a yoga class.
And being, you know, the person that I was, people had been telling me for years, it will help you heal from grief, from grief. Yoga is great, you should try it. So I thought, what do I have to lose? And I tried it. I could hardly do anything. I was a 97 pound weakling.
But I loved it. I took to it like a duck in water. Why? Because it was, it asked nothing of me. It wasn't competitive.
You didn't have to be strong, you didn't have to have a beautiful body.
It accepted you. And you could do with yoga anything that you felt comfortable doing. So I felt like a duck and water when I started doing yoga. And I realized at that point, and remember this is concurrent with the time I was working at the university in the vital aging area. And I thought, I want to become a yoga teacher so that I can work with older people.
And that is what I did. On my 65th birthday, I was studying for my anatomy test in my yoga teacher training. So that is how I came to teach yoga to older people. And I did this in community settings, some of which are not with us anymore, were casualties of the pandemic, like the Wilder center for Aging. I taught only in nonprofit community SO settings. And honestly, Liz, this was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I taught for eight years until physically I was not able to do it anymore.
But I because yoga is eminently adaptable, because it asks that we only be ourselves, I highly recommend it to all who are doing well and to all who are healing or in need of something that in which you can find self acceptance it was a wonderful experience for me.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Great.
Well, we have to dive into a subject that's a little bit less fun, which is ageism.
We have to talk about it. It's there. It's true. And I'm wondering some of your thoughts about ageism.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: I think ageism is one of the most pervasive biases we have in our dominant society.
I think that we still, to this day, and we could look at other cultures for the way to live beautifully in all ages of life. But in this dominant culture here in the United States, we tend to shunt old people aside, we tend to segregate them from the rest of the population by putting them in places like nursing homes, which represents very much of a diminishment in quality of life for most people. And I think that one of the most difficult parts of ageism is that we can be both victims and perpetrators at the same time.
So it is up, I believe, to each of us, no matter our age, to not speak the language of ageism.
And part of. I think one good way not to do that is to respect each and every person you touch in your life as someone who is your equal. And like you, we are all humans. We are much more alike than we are different.
So I think we have to fight ageism through our own behavior every day of our lives.
The other part to that is we have to stand up for, against. We have to resist ageist behavior every time we witness it.
So I know I'm being a little prescriptive here, but it's a matter of just trying in whatever happens in your life, to try to do the best you can to resist ageism. First of all, be aware. Listen for it. I'll tell you a little story.
This happened a couple years ago to me. I order my prescriptions through an online pharmacy that's part of my clinic. And so a couple years ago, I had a problem with one of my prescriptions. And it turned out I had to call this pharmacy's customer service department.
And the person, the customer service representative that I talked with, she insisted upon calling me honey over and over again, honey this and honey that. And finally, I said to her, gently and politely, please don't call me honey. It's not professional.
And lo and behold, she stopped calling me honey. But she was still very nice to me. So it's such a. It can be a very benign, easy, comfortable thing to show that resistance.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Would you talk about your rabbi in the nursing home?
[00:17:08] Speaker C: My father, at the age of 93, was in a nursing home.
In hospice care. His children, which number six, each of us went every day to see him. So that never a day went by we. When he didn't see one of his kids. So one day I went there to see him. And I'm walking along in the hall and I see this forlorn looking gentleman sitting in a wheelchair in the hall, sort of staring blankly with no one around him. It didn't look like there was anyone there taking care of him or concerned about him. And so I kind of smiled at him and said hello. And lo and behold, the man I was looking at was the longtime rabbi of the congregation that our family belonged to. He had been the rabbi there for 40 years.
And there he was, sitting forlornly in a wheelchair in a nursing home with no one looking after him.
And I looked at him and I said, my God, Rabbi, hello, how are you?
And then people, somehow someone came for him to take him away to eat, and they called him Bernie. And he had this name tag on that said Bernie. Well, to me, he wasn't Bernie, he was Rabbi. You know, I'm Jewish, so rabbis are very respected, wise teachers, even in contemporary Judaism.
And so in my mind I'm saying, don't call him Bernie, call him Rabbi. But I knew that wasn't right either. And so there he was. He was just Bernie there, and he was, and I think rightly treated like everyone else there. But what bothered me was that anyone, whether you're a rabbi or whatever, you are an imam, whatever, should be left alone in a hallway, sitting in a wheelchair with no one showing concern for you.
And this is partly what I mean. And this was a good nursing home, not a bad one.
So I think we all have to be. And Liz, honestly, when you mentioned ageism, I think behavior in nursing homes is honestly a huge part of that.
If we have loved ones who are nursing homes and we visit or have contact in other ways, we should look and be aware so that we're always part of positive change in however small ways we can.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Yes, yes. I can't imagine I'm Jewish as well, and I can't imagine my rabbi alive and vital and interesting and all kinds of wonderful conversations to be in that position, you know, it would, you know, it would be very, very upsetting. But at any rate, my story, I'm.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: So happy to know it.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Yes. Now, another thing, and I got the idea for this question actually from your previous book, After Effects, but it comes also in this book as well about being alone.
And I think that there's two different ways of being alone. I, too, am single and never had kids and blah, blah, blah. So I know that aspect of being alone. But also, my father lived to be 90, and after he turned about 85, all of his friends had passed on, and so he was alone. And his wife had Alzheimer's, so he was really alone in the world. And I'm wondering, you know, if you would talk some about being alone, your experiences, and what you feel about other people's experiences.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: Thank you, Liz.
I think your father's story is probably not very unusual.
It's sad, but all too common, I think. You know, last year, the Surgeon General issued a loneliness report, and he warned that we are in a loneliness epidemic, if you can believe that.
So I think being alone a contented, positive way to live for many of us. But for many of us, it is not. And no matter how, we all need human connection in one way or another. I think part of the problem when you get old is that, as you mentioned, you lose your spouse, whether to death or to disease, and find yourself alone.
And that makes you vulnerable to loneliness. And loneliness is debilitating. Loneliness can be a killer. It can increase your chance of getting a terminal illness.
It can increase, some studies say, by 30% your chance of getting dementia. And again, so I think it's something that we have to actually work at. We have to work to stay connected. I hate that word, work. But connection is good. It's a positive thing to. So I could say only for anyone that feels lonely to try to connect in ways that feel comfortable and positive to you, not ways that you're not comfortable with. So if you're not a flaming extrovert, want to get out and have dinner with 30 people at the Pancake House, then don't do that.
Maybe try, if you are a bit of a joiner, perhaps you try a book club or something where a few people might get together or try something. For me, during the pandemic, online virtual connection was a lifesaver for me. So if you are not able to get out or you are more comfortable online, try something online. There are so many opportunities for people who, you know, I don't want to promote my book too much. I don't want to be shameless about it, but I do think it's got a lot that is worth reading in it. And I think part of what might be worth reading for people of any age are the parts about loneliness and how to live well, even though you may be vulnerable to loneliness. Does that make sense, Liz?
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Yes, it makes a lot of sense.
I want to ask you briefly, you talk about having a longevity goal and I'm wondering how that brings you joy and enjoyment of life and what you're is your longevity goal still might be, or have you expanded it a little bit?
[00:24:21] Speaker C: Well, thank you for asking. It's kind of embarrassing, isn't it?
I would like to live to 90, but now I've kind of changed since I wrote the book a little bit. And now I don't think as much about my lifespan anymore, but now I think more about my health span, not so much how long my horizon is for staying alive, but how long can I stay healthy so that I can do what I want and live independently, make my own decisions? And I like that in a way better because I have more control over my health than I do over my lifespan. So I guess to answer your questions, yeah, I think if I had to restate my goal, it would still be 90, but I don't aspire to it as much anymore. I only aspire to feeling good.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yes. Yes, I can relate to that. Boy, oh boy, I can't believe the time has gone by. I have a whole nother page of questions, but I'm going to have to wrap it up here. But I'll ask you one more question, which is what are your final words about radical endurance?
[00:25:41] Speaker C: My final words are live well. As you live long, it is better to live well than to worry about living long. And I think if I had to make the point about radical endurance, that is it. Love life.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, I hope you're having a happy Passover.
[00:26:03] Speaker C: And you too, Liz.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Really.
So we have been talking to Andrea Gulitz about Radical Endurance, a book of essays about aging.
I will be shameless if you won't be shameless and say it's an excellent book, very enjoyable book about aging.
And so thank you very much, Andrea. Appreciate your help.
[00:26:32] Speaker C: Thank you all your Fresh air people out there. I hope you enjoyed our little conversation. Many thanks, Liz.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: You bet. Thank you. And now this.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: You have been listening to Right on radio on KFAI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web at KFAI.org I'm Josh Weber joined in studio with Liz Olds and Eric Zimmerman. Thanks again for tuning in to another great episode. We will see you next week. Oh, and we're talking this evening to Andrea Gilets about her book Radical Endurance.
