Centenarian Ruth Sweedler has impressive recall and can make good conversation about what’s going on in the world. Over the years, strangers and family members alike have commented on it.
“My doctor loves to talk to me,” Sweedler says. “He’d say, ‘You’re amazing.’ And I’d say, ‘Because I’m old?’ And he’d say, ‘No! Because you’re sophisticated.'”
Sweedler, who lives in a retirement home in Connecticut, is proud of the way she’s retained her faculties: “I don’t talk like an old lady.”
It probably helps that she doesn’t think of herself that way: “I don’t feel that I’m old,” says Sweedler, who turned 103 in December.
Her sister Shirley Hodes, whose independent living facility is about 800 miles away by car, in North Carolina, echoes those sentiments. “I’m not that old!” says Hodes, who’s 106. “I don’t feel old, that’s the truth.” She’s still excited to learn new things, especially from books.
“I never did crossword puzzles,” Hodes says, but “I always did a lot of reading. That’s the best thing for your mind.”
The sisters share their best advice for staying sharp as you age:
1. Work
Sweedler “loved to work,” she says. She was an amateur actress in local theater productions and stayed “very active” in both her synagogue and in various Jewish organizations.
“Not that I’m so religious,” she says. “But I’m aware that I’m Jewish, and I like being involved.” Once, as part of a lunch-and-learn study group at the synagogue, she read through the Hebrew Bible in six months.
When her two children were older, Hodes got a full-time job as a paraprofessional and a teacher’s aide. She stayed nearly 20 years and only retired at age 70. “I loved working at the high school,” she says.
An aptitude test had told her that she could have been a teacher herself. That would have been exciting. She would have been thrilled to be a journalist, too, she says, since “I always loved interviewing people.” Now she draws on those skills getting to know the other residents of her assisted living…
Read the full article here
