Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
In 79 years, Andrea Gilats has had a lot to endure.
Perhaps the worst was the cancer death of her husband of two decades when he was 52, setting off a decade of what she calls prolonged grief disorder.
As if it were not enough also to suffer from emphysema, Crohn’s disease, osteoporosis, hypertension, left-eye extreme nearsightedness and surgery for two brain aneurysms.
Yet she has persevered, recovering from grief’s depths during a career as a program creator and director at the University of Minnesota, retiring at 66. Now she’s upbeat about the future and in Radical Endurance, she urges others to feel the same, stressing the importance and advantages of being active and involved.
Her very insightful, inspiring book grew from the shocking notes from a “wellness exam,” a brief look-over offered annually by Medicare.
“Andrea Gilats is a 74-year-old female who presents at that age,” she read. What? She always thought she “presented” younger.
“I saw that I was about to descend from older woman to old woman,” she says. “A self-protective myth was about to give way to reality. … Being old means that you will die pretty soon.”
She has no such plans, and as she makes plain and recommends, she is determined to make the most of the time that remains.
But not without feeling the social effects of age — health, yes, but also “ageism.” She calls the overt and subconscious denigration of old people “a shameful waste product of the 20th century’s longevity revolution.”
She says she’s “officially entered the age of invisibility,” one of the growing “cohort of people who, dull people absurdly believe, have outlived their usefulness.”
But for most older people, that’s not true, just one result of our time’s increase in expected lifespan — longevity — from better nutrition, better health care and many people’s sometimes frustrating determination to remain active after qualifying for Medicare.
One of her university programs was intended to help older faculty overcome fear of retirement.
Retirement “represented a profound, irrecoverable loss of selfhood,” she says. “Who would they be without their lifelong career identities?” The program suggested ways to avoid the fear of becoming irrelevant.
But she came to realize that the Encore Transition program would for some become a false narrative, “a Pollyannaish view of retirement life,” easily shattered by loss of money, loved one or health.
That happened to her. Finding no yoga classes for people beyond svelte Spandex age, she taught her own for eight years until the aneurysms.
“I came through the ordeal, my mind intact, but I never regained my pre-surgery blaze” or “encore career.”
She decided to “look more critically at the ingrained assumption that old age is a time of gradual dissipation or sudden decline” and “define for herself what constitutes health in later life.”
Much of that for her is doing what gives her a feeling of wellness for as long as she is able.
Gilats offers much to consider for people near or beyond retirement, and I would expect grateful agreement as she explains what they’re experiencing and why. It’s useful also for young adults to understand older relatives’ feelings.
She also deals with antisemitism, which she’s experienced, memory and Alzheimer’s, “the one disease I fear most.”
She calls nursing homes “holding pens, waiting rooms in which failing elders mark time until their inevitable deaths.”
She had her own near-confinement during the pandemic, seldom leaving her St. Paul condominium overlooking the river, wearing a mask even in the hallways and being vaccinated three times.
For a much-needed break, at 77 she and sister Resa took a masked-up road trip to Badlands National Park.
Stopping for dinner in South Dakota at Al’s Oasis, known for giant steaks, they found themselves in maskless surroundings. She soon came down with COVID she attributes to a chatty Al’s waitress standing less than a foot from their heads.
“Scared to my shivering bones,” she was able to get Paxlovid and began to recover after five days. Resa did not get the drug and suffered for three weeks, not regaining her pre-COVID wellness for three months.
Gilats says that with aneurysms and COVID, she’s avoided death twice. But what remains?
“What remains after you are no longer obligated to serve any particular person or any institution, … when you no longer need to sell your time for money?” No meetings, nothing to shop for and “when your idea of selfhood no longer applies? … Freedom.”
Gilats concludes, “I do whatever I want within the blissful boundaries of my internal sense of decency and duty. This is my present; this is my future.”
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Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.
(American Jewish World, January 2025)
