The secret to my mother’s robust health

She’s 87 but looks a decade or more younger. Good genes are only part of the equation.

I am spending a few days with my elderly mother interstate. My mother is a most unusual woman (although not at all to be confused with Margeaux, the venomous mother character played by the brilliant Heather Mitchell in Fake, the television series based on my book). I cannot, will not, of course, describe my mother’s stubborn eccentricities here.

But I can, without controversy, describe her extraordinary and unusual robust good health. At 87, nearly 88, she lives independently in a house with multiple flights of stairs – a double knee replacement a few years ago has allowed her to continue going up and down them multiple times a day. She drives well and fearlessly (the less said about a recent road incident recently the better 😱). I can’t remember the last time she got sick. She doesn’t nap. She takes nothing but blood pressure medication and, occasionally, supplemental cherry pills which she believes to be helpful for her gout, good grief. She drinks too much supplemental single malt whisky (which, conceivably, I gently suggest to her, might be connected to the gout). She gets out and about … a weekly quilting group, the shops, um, the betting agency. She gardens in a fashion, grows brilliant herbs. Aside from the stairs and the light gardening, she does almost no exercise (bar exercising her vocal chords yelling at the television), yet this week we walked together to the beach … down a long pathway/set of stairs, along the sand where she sat awhile (she needed a bit of a tug from me to stand again) and then back up a steep dune/hill to the road. It was the first time she had done the walk, a kilometre or so, in a year or more. She wasn’t in the least puffed.

There is, without doubt, excellent, long-lived genetic material involved – Mum’s father lived to the age of 92, her mother to 99. But a few things that have crossed my screen this week have made me give more thought to what is behind her robustly good health – I think I might have worked out her secret – and emphasised just how important it is for us to try and maintain the best health we can for as long as we can.

An article in Fortune magazine this week quoted Maddy Dychtwald, the author of Ageless Aging: A Woman’s Guide to Increasing Healthspan, Brainspan, and Lifespan: “It’s time to be the CEO of our own healthcare,” she says.

Dychtwald refers to women’s “longevity bonus” – the extra time they get in life because they live longer than men. Nevertheless, they “spend at least a decade at the end of their lives in poor health, more so than men, due to financial inequities, disease risks, and other factors”. It adds: “there is a pressing need to help women close the gap between life span and health span – how long you live versus how long you live in good health.”

As I considered my mother’s health secrets, I was reminded of another deeply alarming article, which is likely to be relevant to many in the Vamp community.