I spent more time than usual in churches north of Denver in 2024.

When three women featured in this column died this year, I interrupted my schedule of errands and chores and was happy to take the time to honor and remember them.

At Highlands United Methodist Church, surrounded by people taking turns holding a microphone, I remembered the pandemic-era interview I conducted with ninety-year-old Elly Lindstrom in her backyard gazebo.

On that day, Elly recounted how she had to make significant adjustments to her daily life due to her failing eyesight. Giving up her car was difficult, she admitted, but Elly’s determined problem-solving showed that she was a woman who could explore and find new means to achieve the same goals.

At Elly’s funeral, I learned that by participating in her newly developed routine, people had come into her life—a church volunteer and a neighborhood teenager who read to her—who had formed strong bonds with her and learned from her, just as I had.

Since saying goodbye to Elly, I’ve been thinking about the other two I wrote about who also died this year. Images of them in the places I often saw them ran through my mind, along with a list of qualities I associated with them: curious, generous, neighborly, willing to show vulnerability, cheerful, thoughtful, resourceful.

Delores Ramirez, my 90-year-old neighbor, used to get food delivered to her home. I wrote about this in connection with the question of how the government funds (or doesn’t fund) services to support the elderly. As I observed Delores’ care circle, which sometimes included my teenage son and his lawnmower, I learned about neighborly care and care acceptance.

Ramirez loved to sit on her porch, smiling and waving at people and dogs passing by. She was always up for a chat. Delores didn’t hesitate to get to know her neighbors.

The third, Helen Yeager, is one I wrote about as part of my series on centenarians in North Denver. I met Helen when I worked at the nursing facility where she lived.

Helen’s life, although she did need help transferring from the wing chair to the wheelchair, was about trying new things and finding joy in her surroundings. She agreed to many of the activities I invited her to, even sing-alongs led by my unbearably awful voice.

Thoughtful and quiet, drawing from deep inner wells of compassion and curiosity, Helen used her increasingly gentle voice to forge connections and encourage more complex thinking among those who sought her time. Helen urged visiting Catholic seminarians to engage with the contemporary concerns of the “elders” who visited them.

Helen’s best friend in the building was a woman who came by every morning to sit down and talk. Helen noticed her friend’s dementia when it made itself known, tilted her head slightly and leaned forward, then hopped on the ride to have a thoughtful, if increasingly ambivalent, conversation each day.

Portfolio of positive images of aging

If our views on aging are fluid, as scholar Becca Levy argues in her book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Views on Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live, then meeting these women has eliminated a lot of my negative thoughts about aging, leaving me with what Levy describes as an aging-inherited mindset.

Levy’s research asks us to create a “portfolio of positive images of aging.” And when we have one, our chances of aging well improve. It’s not complicated. List four older people you admire. They can come from your own life or from the world around you – people you’ve read about, learned about from history, or chosen from the notable figures of our time.

For each trait, list a few qualities you admire, attributes you want to strengthen in yourself or see more of in the world. Curious, generous, neighborly, willing to show vulnerability, cheerful, thoughtful, resourceful.

“The more we become aware of and internalize positive models of aging,” Levy wrote, “the more our conscious or unconscious negative ideas about aging that we have adopted because of the ageism around us break down.”

And the more we look to positive role models, the better we are at aging well ourselves. “Positive role models not only make us feel good,” Levy wrote based on her research, “they actually help change our behavior.”

Levy’s portfolio concept is one of several tools to achieve what she calls individual age liberation. If we want to go even further and break the age code for ourselves and future generations, Levy describes below a second set of tools that will lead us to societal age liberation.

Today I content myself with browsing through the dozens of pictures in my portfolio. Most of the people in them are alive and well and having significant adventures this summer.

But the deaths of Elly, Delores and Helen have reminded me that there are many ways to live on when life is over. Becoming part of a portfolio that transcends age is a particularly powerful opportunity.

Editor’s Note: This is Kathryn White’s final installment of The Gray Zone.

Kathryn White has lived in North Denver since the early 1990s and founded The Gray Zone in 2020. She became editor of The Denver North Star in October 2023. She has taught fitness classes at the Highland Senior Recreation Center, volunteered with the Alzheimer’s Association, and worked at a neighborhood senior living facility.

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