“There are just two of us left now,” Jemima Westcott says wistfully. Only she and her kid brother, a sprig at age 94, remain of a once-thriving family. Westcott’s older sisters died at age 105 and 107, and she marked her own 105th birthday in January at a dinner party in her cozy condo in Brandon, Manitoba, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Widowed for 50 years, she still lives alone, cooking and cleaning for herself — her only concession to old age is using a walker.
Westcott has lived through iconic events of the 20th century. She has vivid memories of the celebrations when soldiers returned home from World War I; of big picnics on her family’s farm on the windswept prairies; of gas rationing during the second world war, when she was a young mother with five kids; and of traveling across Europe, North Africa and the U.S., and even diving in the Great Barrier Reef during a yearlong stint in Australia after she retired.
“I’ve had an adventurous life,” says the former schoolteacher, an admitted night owl who stays up into the wee hours and likes to sleep in. Her secret to a long life? “Resilience.”
Westcott may be on to something. She’s a participant in the New England Centenarian Study, a long-term research project at the Boston Medical Center that studies why people like her enjoy such exceptional longevity. What they’ve found, thus far, is that healthy habits and positive attitudes will only get you so far: Centenarians are winners of the genetic lottery and, like Westcott, have a clustering of long-lived relatives. They are remarkably intact mentally, and up to 90 percent of them can function independently into their ninth decade. Surviving past age 100 means they’ve largely evaded the scourges that kill their peers before they reach their 90s (what’s called compressed morbidity), or sidestepped the worst aspects of these life-threatening diseases — even if they strike sooner — because they have combinations of protective genes, what researchers call “greater functional reserves.”
