Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 08/24/22

Life in the balance. Judy Gaman, co host of the Stay Young America! podcast, was the director of business for a high-profile medical practice, a job that included writing health and wellness materials and hosting a nationally syndicated radio show, when she set out to research the secrets to living to 100 for a new book. That’s when she met Lucille Fleming, a centenarian who forever altered her path in life. She shares Lucille’s insights into living a long and meaningful life in Love, Life and Lucille: Lessons Learned from a Centenarian.

JWK: What was your story before you met Lucille?

Judy Gamen: I was very busy as a mother of his, mine and ours – ten kids! Being married to a physician, we both were very, very busy.

I was basically a third-generation workaholic. It was the only life I knew. My mom and dad both worked growing up and then divorced. So, I was raised by a single mom and kinda, I guess, took on both their work ethics. It was all about what I could accomplish, checking the boxes – not so much about stopping to smell the roses, make friends, enjoy life and laugh a little bit more.

As a child I was a very happy child. I laughed all the time, I loved to play, I had a very creative mind and something in that I think kinda died a little bit in adulthood. So, that kinda paints a little bit of what my life was like. You know, some time out before the sun came up in the morning and home after the sun went down.

JWK: Tell me about your career.

JG: I’m now the CEO of Executive Medicine of Texas. At that time I was the director of business development.

JWK: How’d your relationship with Lucille begin?

JG: I was working on the book called Age to Perfection: How to Thrive to 100, Happy, Healthy and Wise. I was writing that with two physicians. I really was doing the research, going down the path of “Okay, what do we know about…living longer?” Then I just had this kind of epiphany: “Why don’t I just ask people who have lived (to be) over 100 how they did it?” So, that’s how I met Lucille.

I had a writing assistant who would help me gather some research and I said “I have this crazy idea. See if you can find some people over 100. I want to interview them.” I literally thought that they would be very different. I thought that she’s gonna find people that maybe can’t communicate. So, I said “You know, they can’t be drooling on themselves. They have to be able to carry on a conversation. They have to have a good memory.” I had this whole list. I also thought I had given her an impossible task but she rose to the occasion.

By the end of the week she had several people for me to interview but “Lucille,”she said, “you’ve got to meet this one – and she can only meet on Friday because she has a very busy social calendar “- which I found hysterical. Between her residents council…and all the things she was working on, I met her on a Friday and that began a long string of Fridays that we spent together.

JWK: How old was she when you first met her?

JG: She has just turned 100 and we stayed friends until she died just two weeks shy of her 104th birthday.

JWK: May I ask how old you were when your relationship began?

JG: I was in my mid-forties.

JWK: So, that was quite an age gap. What was her story when you met her?

JG: She was absolutely the most fascinating human being. She was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada. She was born to a potato farmer. They lived on a farm. She went to school but she just knew there was kinda more. She decided farming wasn’t really gonna be her gig. She left with a locket around her neck and a suitcase in her hand and she moved to Boston. This was in the middle of the Depression.

So, she got there and put herself through nursing school and started working as a nurse’s aide to earn her money to pay her tuition…She had a very long career as a nurse which I think was fascinating because we both had that medical field experience. My mother was a nurse. So, I grew up around that a lot. She was able to balance being a nurse and having friends and having a social life. My mom was all about being a nurse. She was always the boss but she was always at work. It was all about the job. For Lucille, it was more about a lifestyle of loving and caring and taking care of people. Later in life, my mom certainly did that after she retired but Lucille just had this way about her that she could light up a room. When she walked into a room every head turned. You could say well maybe it was because she had such an incredible sense of fashion. Maybe you could say it was because she was fun and she was funny – but she had a light about her. It was just an aura of goodness that just surrounded her everywhere she went.

JWK: Sounds like she figured out how to balance work and a personal life.

JG: She did. She had children. She raised two boys. She had a happy marriage. Unfortunately, she was a widow by the time I had met her. But she did. She learned how to enjoy life and make everyone she met feel like they were the most important person in the world. So many people have told me that. They have said “You know, when Lucille passed away it was like my personal cheerleader died” – and I thought, you know, that’s so true. She was a personal cheeleader for everybody. She had a way of lifting people up. I’m so glad I experienced that. I have really tried to incorporate that into my own life – less stress and less judgment and far more cheerleading.

JWK: How much of that was just the way she was and how much was it what she had learned along the way? How much of that way can be taught?

JG: I do believe that the hard work and the stick-to-it-iveness was really ingrained in her as a child. She was probably born with that. I think her general personality was to be friendly but I also believe it’s the things she lived through – losing her best friend to consumption, getting on a train to a new land and going somewhere and not knowing what to expect. It’s all those things. They didn’t always go as planned. It was the fact that she had lived through so much good, bad, ugly, everything in between. It just shaped her (so) that she could really accomplish anything. She really believed that…We sometimes let the world tell us who we are and she continually told the world who she was. I’ve tried to adapt that into my own life and not let the world, the media, the politics, any of this stuff tell me who I am. She was really good at that. I think that one of the fabulous things she enriched my life with was the ability to do that.

JWK: In your book you talk about a time when you lyme disease and how she helped you get through that.

JG: Oh, it was just dreadful. I had to include it in the story because it really showed the complexity of our friendship. I mean a true, true best friend through everything! When I had lyme disease, I was so sick…I couldn’t write. I couldn’t work. At a certain point I couldn’t drive. The nurse in her just kicked in. She just continued to be that cheerleader. I was so fortunate! My dad came into town and he became my personal chauffeur because, otherwise, I was stuck at the house.

There was a time – and I wrote about this in the book – where I was just laying across the bed. I was just kind of sideways. I was just sobbing in pain and she came and sat down next to me and just kinda stroked my hair and she sang. Her voice was very much an old voice but it just was like an angel singing to me. It just gave me hope that this wasn’t gonna be my life, that this was just a small pivot of my life. It gave me incredible strength. She was like that. I was supposed to help her move…I couldn’t even help myself, so I couldn’t help her move…She just figured it out and moved into her new place.

JWK: You two actually lived together at one point, right?

JG: Yeah, she actually did come to live at my life. She had taken a fall. She needed to go to rehab and the rehab places were just so undesirable. So, she did. She came to live with me for a period of time. It was great. It was fantastic. She was there in the morning, there at night. There’s a lot of really funny things in the book that happened when she lived with me.

JWK: How long did she live with you?

JG: Not that long. I think it was a few months but it was an incredible time. I knew that, hey, every day she needed to still have experiences. So, whatever that is – whether that’s, you know, making blueberry waffles, which was her favorite, or smelling different herbs out of the garden or whatever it is. It was a great time. A lot of people that read the book tell me that that’s part of when they laughed the most was during that time.

JWK: What would you say was the greatest lesson she taught you?

JG: I think one thing I gathered from her that I think is really important is that true friendship knows no age. We always think that if we want to find a friend we maybe have an idea of what they should look like or what they should act like or what their views of the world should be but it was so enriching to have a friend that I wasn’t necessarily looking for. I never said “Oh, I’m gonna go find somebody who’s a centenarian and I’m gonna become best friends with her.” That was never the case.

Just being open to being friends with and sharing your life or your human experience with maybe someone who doesn’t look like you or have the same experiences or even is from the same generation, I think it’s important for us to realize that the human experience itself is an experience that has no ties to what generation you grew up in, what your socio-economic class, what your race is (or) what country you’re born in. What I mean by that is we’ve all had a first love, we’ve all tasted the joy of accomplishment and we’ve all felt the bitterness of defeat…and when we live life together we’re living those experiences together.

JWK: Did she ever share with you her thoughts about God and the afterlife?

JG: Yes, there actually is a whole chapter in the book called The God Story. She brought it up – we were driving – “What do you think happens after we die?” It’s really a sweet chapter. It’s even more sweet now that she has passed away…When I was recording the audio book, that was a real tender moment. There was a moment where I actually had to take my headset off and leave the room for a minute. On the audio book I have Fay Bailey who’s an 80-something year old, a dear friend of mine who knew Lucille, voice only Lucille’s lines in the book. When we got to the God chapter she read that and her voice, her inflection, everything was identical to that moment when we really had the conversation, Lucille and I. I just had to take the headset off and kind of step outside.

JWK: Is there a particular insight you can share about what her thoughts were?

JG: We both shared that there is an afterlife and (talked about) God and what we think a heaven would be like. We made a pact that whoever died first – and, you know, having had lyme disease and being so close to death myself, there was no guaranty that she was going to be the first one to die – that, you know, we’d meet each other on the other side with open arms.

It was just a beautiful discussion that really, I think, solidified that our life on Earth is not the end. Our life on Earth is a trial period where we’re doing this human experience but our spirits go on. We both felt very strongly that our spirits would be in a place of joy (and) be in a place where we’d recognize each other’s spirit. It was just a beautiful conversation. It’s so hard, without reading it, to really give it the flavor that it has in the book but I couldn’t write the book without including that.

An interesting story. The book was finished and I was searching out an agent or a publishing house. On more than one occasion I was told that I needed to take the God part out of my book and I said “No. That’s not gonna happen.” I even had one agent say “You know, you don’t have any bad words in the book. Maybe we need to spice this thing up.” I couldn’t believe my ears. I was like “Spice it up how?! This is how it happened!”

And the people that have read it have said “Oh, my gosh! It would have ruined the book!” It was such as escape for the readers to go to a place of honesty, truth, love and friendship without having to have a token bad word or, you know, a sex scene or whatever. Those aren’t in the book. It’s so much about the richness of life that it doesn’t need that. I’ve been blessed to have had the book win so many awards. It just solidifies to me that we don’t have to put this stuff the world tells us into our books, our movies, our what have you? People recognize love and they appreciate love. They recognize laughter and joy and we need more of that. I really believe we need more of that and less of the other.

JWK: Has your relationship with Lucille helped alleviate any of the fear you may had – which most people have – about growing older and of death?

JG: You know, I’ve never been afraid of dying. I’m terrified of being tortured but I’ve never been afraid of dying. I did have a fear of getting old and what I thought old looked like. She was such an inspiration that I now embrace the aging process. Not that I want to age like how we think people age but I would love to age like Lucille. She really opened my eyes. I now work less hours. The irony is I kinda started working less hours and having more joy in my life and I still got the promotions.

I really believe in aging the right way. That doesn’t mean Botox and all these things that people do to look young on the outside. It’s about you staying young in your spirit, staying young in your life, staying active in everything you do. That’s really the key and she did it so beautifully.

JWK: You say that, even at her age, she was still figuring out things about life. Do you feel like you taught her anything?

JG: Yeah, I think so. While she was busy doing things, I think one thing that she learned through our friendship was that she still had quite a purpose. She became a longevity expert. She went out on a book tour with me on that Age to Perfection book. She had no idea she’d be so good at media through television and radio. She was just a huge hit and she loved it!

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.