HEALTHY AT 100 (4 page)

They work hard, but they are fortunate in that their work does not entail the emotional stress we often associate with work. Their work tempos are natural expressions of biological rhythms, and they have no sense of the drivenness and hurry that predominate in most industrialized nations. In fact, Abkhasians distinctly dislike being rushed and have no concept of a deadline. The only time they feel a sense of urgency is during rare actual emergencies, such as when a house is on fire. Other than that, they are remarkably relaxed, and often joke and sing while working.
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How many of us in the modern world can say the same thing about our work environment? Some of us fear that unless we are driven by a sense of urgency and competition we will become lazy. But the Abkhasians are anything but lazy. In fact, they are astoundingly fit. When Dr. Alexander Leaf learned of an old man, Kosta Kashig, said to be 106 years old, who spent the summers with his goats in the high alpine pastures, he wanted to meet the elder in that setting to learn firsthand the level of physical exertion involved in his daily activities. Leaf set out early one morning with two companions and a young local guide to climb to where the elder could be found. The trail, however, proved so steep and muddy that his two companions gave up about one-third of the way up and headed back downhill. Only Leaf and the young guide continued on.

After six hours of arduous climbing, they came out of the woods and onto a grassy slope where Kosta Kashig was spending the summer tending his goats. Leaf proceeded to have a lengthy discussion
with the old man, after which he concluded Kashig was not 106, but probably “only” 90. Whichever age was correct, Leaf wrote that for Kashig “to be able to spend four months of the year bounding over the hillside from dawn until dusk in pursuit of his agile goats was re-markable.”
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Eventually, Leaf made the long and difficult climb down from the high pastureland. When he arrived back in town, he was exhausted, but also elated to have accomplished the trek and proud of how fast he had been able to make it down. Then he learned to his amazement that Kosta Kashig, be he 106 or only 90, regularly made the same trek in just half the time it had taken Leaf. Such is the level of physical fitness commonplace among the elderly in Abkhasia.

Our capacity to understand the lifestyles of the Abkhasians owes much to the work of Dr. Sula Benet. A professor of anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York, she was fluent in Russian, which all Abkhasians understand, and she spent several years living in Abkhasia, doing fieldwork under the auspices of Columbia University, the Social Science Research Council, the Research Institute for the Study of Man, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Her book,
Abkhasians: The Long-Living People of the Caucasus
, is considered one of the finest case studies in cultural anthropology ever written.
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As to the controversy over the ages of the oldest of the old, Benet felt it didn’t matter that much. “If a person lives to 120 rather than 130 in health and vigor,” she said, “the fact of old age is barely di-minished.”
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Though not knowing the exact age of any particular elder, she pointed out the remarkable fact that people in Abkhasia have specific terms or expressions for great-grandparents going back six generations. These expressions are used to refer to the living, not to those who have died.
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Very few languages contain expressions for so many generations of living relatives.

Benet was also impressed by the physical condition of even the very elderly in Abkhasia. Only the oldest people have wrinkles, she noted. Only the very elderly have gray hair. Baldness is extremely
rare.
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More than a third of those over ninety do not need glasses for any kind of work, including reading or threading a needle.
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Most have their own teeth. And Benet was particularly affected by the beautifully erect posture elderly Abkhasians maintain, even to very advanced ages.
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Most tellingly, she found that “sickness is not considered a normal or natural event even in very old age.”
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To Benet, the reasons for the remarkable health and longevity in Abkhasia are many. One factor that she highlighted in particular was the tremendous respect for the aged that is a defining feature of Abkhasian culture. In Abkhasia, a person’s status increases with age, and he or she receives ever more privileges with the passing years. This deference does not depend on wealth or occupation. Elders are respected, even revered, simply by virtue of being old. Elders who are poor and known only to their families have greater social standing in Abkhasian society than someone who may have become rich and famous but is not yet an elder. There is nothing elders have to do to earn this respect. They are never required to compete with younger people.
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When one U.S. researcher explained to a group of Abkhasians that in the wealthy United States, old people are sometimes left homeless and hungry, he was met with total disbelief. Nothing he said could overcome their inability to grasp such a reality.

The Abkhasian respect for the aged is clear from their vocabulary. They do not even have a phrase meaning “old people.” Instead, those over 100 are called “long-living people.”
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And all Abkhasian villages celebrate a holiday in their honor called “the Day of the Long-Living People.” On this day each year, the elders dress in elaborate costumes and parade before the rest of the villagers, who gather to pay them homage.
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The more I have learned about Abkhasian culture, the more I’ve been struck by the contrast with the modern industrialized world, and the more I’ve become aware of how youth-obsessed we are. In Abkhasia, people are esteemed and seen as beautiful in their old age. Silver hair
and wrinkles are viewed as signs of wisdom, maturity, and long years of service.

In the West, on the other hand, we tend to associate old age with ugliness and youth with beauty, so much so that an increasing number of people today are willing to spend a great deal of money and undergo a considerable degree of pain in order to have facelifts, that they might look younger.

Are these people putting themselves through the agony of a procedure that includes skull drains, titanium screws, bloody eyes with lashless lids, tightened skin, painfully slow recoveries, and eating tiny bites of baby food because they are vain and unable to accept nature and life’s realities?
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Or is it because they are fighting to ward off the invisibility that all too often comes with aging in a culture where looking older is equated with a loss of beauty and value? Some say that only people who hate themselves would be willing to undergo such an ordeal, but I wonder. Living in a youth-obsessed culture, maybe they hate the way they are treated because of how they look.

Popular television programs like
The Swan
and
Extreme Makeover
have contributed greatly in recent years to the rise in cosmetic surgery. At the climax of one show, a participant (having received a million dollars’ worth of plastic surgery) was finally revealed. Her elated husband beamed at the camera. “I had a forty-year-old wife,” he said, “and now I have a twenty-five-year-old wife.” Deliriously happy with the change in his wife’s appearance, he described the improvement entirely as a matter of her looking younger. I’m sure he meant it as a compliment, but his comment reflected something about our culture that I find troubling. Is it really better to have a twenty-five-year-old wife than a forty-year-old wife? Is younger always better?

The Simpsons
television show often satirically portrays cultural trends that are all too real. In one episode, a children’s hospital was torn down so the new Springfield Plastic Surgery Clinic could be built. Mayor Quimby gave a speech at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “Thanks to this clinic,” he said, “we will no longer be terrorized by the spectacle of women aging naturally.”

American Idol
is another television program that reflects the perspectives of mainstream Western culture. The show has phenomenal
ratings. In 2004, more than forty-nine million viewers tuned in to watch the finale. When the
American Idol
judges were asked whether they would consider getting plastic surgery, one of the judges, Simon Cowell, said he would make it mandatory for every woman over forty.

He probably thought he was being funny. I don’t think he had any idea what the impact of his remark was on every woman over forty, and indeed on younger women, too, each of whom will likely be over forty someday herself.

This kind of thing takes a terrible toll on women’s self-image, which is none too high in the modern world in the first place. A worldwide 2004 survey by Dove soap found that only 2 percent of women consider themselves “beautiful.” And it gets worse as women get older. Among women over sixty, almost none consider themselves even “average-looking.”
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In my eyes, this is cruel. But it’s the norm wherever women are beset by unobtainable media images of beauty and by a cosmetics industry that encourages women to be terrified of aging. One cosmetics ad shows a woman in her forties fiercely proclaiming, “I don’t intend to grow old gracefully. I’m going to fight it every step of the way.”

I do take heart, though, from the fact that modern Western culture is not the only way people can live and its prevailing assumptions are not the only way people can think. Moreover, there are signs, even in the modern world, that things could be changing. A new ad campaign from Dove skin care products, for example, features Irene Sinclair, a ninety-six-year-old woman with a luminous smile who was discovered at a nursing home in London. The ad asks, “Will society ever accept that old can be beautiful?”

In Abkhasia, it would be considered an insult to be told that you are “looking young” or that the years have barely changed you. People there compliment others by saying “You’re looking old today,” meaning that the person is wise and beautiful in their maturity. In Abkhasia, when older people lie about their age, they do not give a
younger age, as is common in the West. Instead, they exaggerate how old they are, for this gives them greater standing in their culture.

Researcher Dan Georgakas sought to explain the exalted social status of the aged in Abkhasia:

Old age is the crown of a successful life.…The psychological climate for the old is so positive that rest homes available through government auspices are rarely utilized, as even in the smallest of families there are many relatives who covet the honor of housing an elder.
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Abkhasians expect a long and useful life, and they look forward to old age with good reason. In a culture which so highly values continuity in its traditions, the elders are indispensable. They are never thought of as—or experienced as—burdens. Quite the contrary, they are the society’s most treasured resources. An oft-repeated Abkhasian proverb is “Besides God, we also need the elders.”
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In the modern Western world, older men who show an interest in sex are sometimes disparaged as “dirty old men.” In Abkhasia, on the other hand, continuation of an active sex life into old age is considered to be as natural as maintaining a healthy appetite or sound sleep. Abkhasians do not think there is any reason why increased years should strip them of so human a function.

Almost everyone who visits Abkhasia ends up remarking on the importance of song, music, and dance in Abkhasian life. People of all ages in Abkhasia love to sing, and there are songs for every occasion. There are lullabies, there are work songs, and there are healing songs. There are special songs for weddings and other rituals. Each chore has a special song. While working in the fields, people often divide into groups for choral singing.

In Abkhasian culture, songs are used like medicine. There is a song called “the Song of the Wounded One” which is sung by friends and relatives to support the recovery of someone who has been hurt. Sometimes the injured one may also sing along.
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When someone falls ill, his or her friends and relatives, in addition to assuming the sick person’s responsibilities, surround the bedside. They tell jokes and stories, and they sing and dance. When someone is about to die,
friends and relatives sing quietly at the bedside, and also at the memorial services.

Singing may not seem to have anything to do with health, but I think it might. When people celebrate and enjoy life, is it possible they are sending life-affirming messages to their cells? Could this help explain why long-living people everywhere tend to be those who live with gusto? They dance, they sing, and they celebrate life as it unfolds.

I also think the way children are raised in Abkhasia has much to do with the kind of elders they eventually grow up to become. Having lived many years in the United States and several years in Abkhasia, Sula Benet was struck by the way Abkhasian children behave and the way they are treated:

I never heard a child cry in protest or a parent raise his voice or threaten spanking. A command is never repeated twice. As a teacher of fidgety American youth, I marveled at Abkhasian schoolchildren who…sit at attention for hours. Such miraculous results are not motivated by fear.”
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Abkhasian parents never scold or nag, and they never criticize or punish their children. How, you may wonder, do they get their children to behave properly? Benet explains:

Abkhasian parents express disapproval by withholding praise, which is otherwise very generously dispensed. The Abkhasian concept of discipline, considered necessary and good for children, is not intertwined with the concept of punishment. Abkhasians feel that physical punishment induces disrespect.…The Abkhasian method of discipline does not allow for the development and expression of even the mildest forms of sadistic impulse.…With no threat of punishment…the young never express resentment. It gradually became apparent to the author that they do not
feel
resentment.
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