Echaves: Ageing gracefully

Sunday, February 12, 2012

WOW! Makaabot kaha ta anang edara noh? (Can we even reach that age?)”

So exclaimed everyone when my father turned 94 last month. Awesome, too, were an elderly couple in Manila featured on TV. The husband was 101 years old and the wife, 100.

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Of course, good genes help. My father’s grandfather, Gen. Saturnino Echavez of the Spanish revolution and after whom a street in the city is named, lived up to the ripe old age of 79.

Respect and care for one’s health, simplicity and spirituality make up the rest. Compare people who’ve lived long and you see common denominators.

There’s the refusal to laze through after retirement from employment. Even after retiring as a Regional Trial Court judge, my father continued to play tennis. When he developed tendonitis, his doctor said my dad’s feet had had enough punishing; it was time to give up the sport.

So he spent more time as a lay minister, first at the Redemptorist Church and then at Sto. Niño Church. When he turned 80, he asked the late Redemptorist priest Father Martin if he should stop. The good priest’s answer: “No, you look like 60.”

So, twice a week, he’d deliberately walk from the Redemptorist Church up Mango Ave. to the National Book Store, or from the Sto. Niño Church up to the DBP building. He needed the exercise, he said, instead of hopping immediately into a taxi.

Luigi Ferrucci, director of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, writes that the Chianti region of Italy has a high percentage of centenarians. One reason is that after retiring from their jobs, the people spent most of the day working on their little farm, cultivating grapes or vegetables.

Prof. Stuart Olshansky of the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago observed that centenarians tend to be creatures of habit. They eat the same kind of diet and do the same kinds of activities their entire lives.

Their strict routines also include going to bed and waking up at the same time each day. Ferrucci agrees that because one’s physiology becomes frailer as he gets older, one’s missing a few hours of sleep can weaken immune defenses, thus easily enabling flu viruses or bacterial infections to enter.

My father’s routine is by the huge clock in his room. He has his regular morning exercise of about 10 minutes. His lunch must never be without malunggay soup, and rice has no place on his dinner plate.

He’s usually up from his afternoon nap at 4 p.m.; otherwise, he should be awakened. His dinner must be at 5:30 p.m., during which he glances at the TV set for his news from ABS-CBN, GMA 7 and CNN. Sleeping time is 7 in the evening, to the music of his favorite CD of Visayan songs.

Spirituality and a yielding to the Lord create peace of mind not often achievable. Long reflections on their lives and those of others strongly echo age-old truisms.

Ninety-year-old Regina Brett of Cleveland, Ohio would say, “Life is too short to be wasted on hating anyone… Everything can change in the blink of an eye, but don’t worry. God doesn’t blink.”

(lelani.echaves@gmail.com)