Wellness in Aging: A Primer

Good health doesn’t come naturally or without effort. Especially as we move into the middle and later years of our lives, we must make the choice between actively pursuing wellness or passively slipping into physical and cognitive decline.

When I was preparing to give my first presentation on Wellness in Aging to residents of an over-55 community here in Houston, I asked my husband what “aging well” means to him. For those of you that don’t know, my husband is twenty years older than me and is therefore in the over-55 category so I thought that maybe he would have some good perspective. And he did! He told me that for him, wellness in aging means having the physical and cognitive capabilities that enable him to be active, social and independent throughout the rest of his life.

His answer lines up perfectly with the answer I would give to the same question, but I describe my ideal old age in terms of Bob and Connie. Bob and Connie are my grandparents on my mother’s side; they both passed away in 2008. Married for over 65 years, my grandparents lived in the same home, drank from the same water sources, ate the same food. But while Connie developed dementia about ten years before she passed away, Bob did not. In fact, he was cognitively sharp as a tack up until the moment he took his last breath following a brief illness.