Breaking with its past practice, the Sunday New York Times this month began featuring same-sex couples among the brides and grooms on its wedding pages. For the record, some other newspapers had done so previously, including several published by the Community Newspaper Company, one of whose papers you are reading now. For the Times, at least, a newspaper boasting international impact and previously rather stuffy in its values, this new policy reflects a notable change of attitude.

In telling about the relationship between Daniel Gross and Steven Goldstein, the Times writer gives us many facts about the two men who the previous evening had exchanged “Jewish vows” before their main ceremony the next day.

The writer injects additional human interest details. For example, when Gross’s mother first heard him tell of being in love with another man, all she could say was a distressful “oy.” But since then, both she and her husband have come to support their son’s choice of partner.

The writer refers to the arrangement between the two men as a “partnership” and a “civil union.” In describing the union of two women, a week later, the Times calls their celebration a “commitment ceremony.” Since no state, not even Vermont, is willing to use the term “marriage” for couples of the same gender, the newspaper does not use the term.

My reason for taking note here of this notable change in journalistic practice is to raise the question of change in social attitudes in the lives of us older people. Most of us grew up with a clear set of values, strongly held by the society around us. But to live long, we discover, is to experience startling departures from these values and to be challenged to adapt to views quite different from our own.

Many of us elders are amazed that people say and do things unthinkable when we were young or even middle aged. Some of us are shocked and scandalized when we see our values rejected or even subjected to ridicule. But, contrary to stereotypes of older people, we also show ourselves quite capable of adapting to some views different from our own and even accepting them with more or less enthusiasm.

My own attitude toward the recognition of love relationships among gay and lesbian couples has changed. Though I grew up in, and still belong to, a faith community that teaches the sinfulness of sexual activity among people of the same gender, I now welcome the commitment of these couples to one another. My bias is to favor love and fidelity wherever they are to be found.

Thus I would rejoice with gay and lesbian friends at their coming together to celebrate a lifetime union. I would hope and pray for their fidelity to one another and be prepared to support them when they face obstacles.

In addition to acceptance of homosexual unions, I also stand strongly in favor of granting to these couples the same civil rights that married people enjoy. I want them to have health insurance, visiting privileges at hospitals, and whatever else will protect their well-being and enhance their fidelity.

However, my acceptance would not extend to calling their union a marriage. My willingness to adapt my values stops short of that change, and I would not want civil authority to allow the term “marriage” for partnerships, however solemnly affirmed, between couples of the same gender.

To me, marriage is by definition a commitment between a woman and a man. It has a unique character making it different from every other relationship. The coming together of male and female in a relationship intended to be permanent and usually looking toward the birth and upbringing of children has a uniqueness about it that should not be diluted.

To make this claim is not to say anything bad about gay and lesbian unions. Nor is it to quibble about words. Both the word “marriage” and the institution it describes have had a long and complex history. It is not clear that “marriage” could accommodate a whole new meaning.

Thus, in early old age, I am quite willing to modify some values about sexuality that I held dearly when younger. But I have my limits. To me, it is important to retain the convictions that remain central to our personality and basic view of the world. Willingness to accept any and all positions simply because they are new would suggest a loss of personhood. To a large extent, after all, we are our convictions.

The views expressed here will probably please hardly anyone. As often happens, I find myself in the uncomfortable middle. Some readers will judge me a confirmed heretic, while others will think me wishy-washy.

But wisdom does not come automatically even to us advanced in years. On some of life’s most important issues, I continue to grope for clarity. In my 75th year, I am still struggling for the truth about my own life and that of the world.                    

Richard Griffin

Last week, we said a final good-bye to Mildred McLaughlin. At her parish church a small group of relatives, and a smaller group of friends, gathered for her simple funeral Mass. No one dropped tears because we felt happy for Mildred’s entering upon a new world after 94 years in this one.

I write about a unique woman and her family who lived in the city where I live. However, there are undoubtedly similar long-lived women and men in every other city and town. They are the people who get to be known as “old timers” and become part of local legend for their style of living, not to say their peculiarities.

Mildred’s home for all but the last two years was on Jackson Street in North Cambridge, several blocks away from the church. There she had lived with her four older sisters in a plain, three-floor wooden house built by her father in 1890 for $1500. In this house the sisters had grown up, learned their place in the family, and took care of the animals they kept in their back yard. These included a cow named Bessie, chickens which provided eggs abundantly, and a dog.

When the McLaughlins were growing up, their section of Cambridge was filled with people of French ethnicity who went to a French-language parish church nearby, but the sisters belonged to the Irish enclave. Both of their parents, William and Mary, were born in Ireland and all of the sisters but Mary eventually visited that country.

Politically, this was Tip O’Neill territory and they were his enthusiastic supporters all the way. In the words of their niece Joanne, “they thought he was the best thing going.”

Mildred’s four older sisters – – Mary, Helen, Cecilia, and Veronica – – went to public high school, then called Cambridge Latin, no short trip from their home. The girls walked the route, a couple of miles each way, without thinking it extraordinary. Mildred, however, was sent to a Catholic school nearby because, in the words of her niece, “they thought she needed it.”

They owned a car but only Cecelia knew how to drive it. Helen had learned but, on one automotive outing, ran into a pear tree and never drove again.

Ultimately, all the sisters, except for one, found employment outside the home. Mildred worked for an insurance company in Boston, making it a practice to eat her lunch at a restaurant each day.  

The oldest sister, Mary, stayed home to take care of the house. Helen, Cecilia, Veronica, and Mildred paid her to do the household work, Monday through Friday, surely a rare arrangement then and now. With even rarer foresight, they also paid Social Security taxes on her employment so that she would have income when she came to retire.

The two brothers in the family, William and John, died in middle age but four of the sisters lived well into their 90s and the other died a few months short of her 90th birthday. As if with a sense of fitness, they died in the order of their birth, beginning with the oldest.

Through the years they enjoyed one another’s company, though Mildred, as the youngest was somewhat spoiled and sometimes out of sorts with the four others. Family members, especially their niece and nephew, loomed large and they relished celebrating holidays with them. Church also was close to the center of their lives offering them a faith that sustained them in hard times.

Despite their other healthful habits, the sisters were not exactly models of nutritional correctness. At the family dinner table, each of the sisters had her own salt shaker. And they would finish each meal by eating something sweet. Mildred also smoked for decades but without any apparent ill effects. She never needed any medications until her last two years.

When she had to move into a nursing home, Mildred found some consolation in knowing that a young family would now live in her house. John, his wife Trudy, and their six-grader son Isaac came to reside on Jackson Street. Only the second family to inhabit the house, they took initiative to meet Mildred and talked with her about the history of the place they had bought from her.

Now that Mildred, the “last leaf,” has fallen, that family tree stands shorn of foliage. She leaves behind a saga of 20th century living in a style vanishing quickly. With rising real estate prices, her neighborhood now boasts families attuned to the high-powered professional world. No longer does one commonly see households with seven children, and adults who walk everyplace they go.

One legacy left behind by Mildred and her sisters is a set of habits that make for good health and longevity. Exercise, low stress, strong community, spiritual life – – these and other elements certainly conduced to long and happy lives for them. Their peculiarities, too, fascinating and endearing, added zest to their lives and perhaps extended them also.

Richard Griffin

When David Snowdon finishes a talk to an audience of older people, frequently the first question they ask is: “What can I do to improve my chances of aging successfully?” His response comes in a single word: “Walk!”

He also recommends much else, such as keeping your brain active, eating good food with other people, and developing your spiritual life.

Dr. Snowdon knows a lot about successful aging. An epidemiologist, he founded the “Nun Study,” a now celebrated research project centered on the School Sisters of Notre Dame. This Catholic community of nuns agreed to take part in 1986 and, by this time, hundreds of them have participated.

In the first few years, while Dr. Snowdon worked at the University of Minnesota, the research was directed toward the connection between education and health in later life. When in 1990 he moved to the medical center at the University of Kentucky, Snowdon’s focus shifted to Alzheimer’s disease. Since that time, his work and that of his associates have become famous among researchers in the field of aging and have also received considerable media attention.

Snowdon rightly considers himself lucky to have found a congregation of religious sisters willing to cooperate with him. They are a researcher’s dream because they share so many life features in common. All unmarried, they live the same style of life and, moreover, their community has kept careful records of each of their members going back to the time they first joined.

It also has helped that David Snowdon was acquainted with nuns from childhood on and had some as teachers in elementary school. He has brought to his research a deep respect for the sisters, with many of whom he has developed close friendships.

At first he felt nervous about proposing to the nuns that they participate in his research. But the way was eased when one of the leaders of the community told him how to deal with the older sisters: “We treat them with the care and respect they deserve. We will expect nothing less from you.” And, to judge from “Aging With Grace,” the book Snowdon authored last year, he has followed through.

The researcher felt even more nervous when he made another, more threatening request of the sisters. He asked them to donate their brains to his study. To his relief, the sisters responded generously, with 678 agreeing to have their brains studied after their death. They based their decision on spiritual motives fundamental to their faith. One said: “It is the spirit that is important after death, not the brain.” And another added: “Resurrection does not depend on how our bodies are in the grave.”

The donors saw the decision as expressing the service of their neighbors to which their whole life had been dedicated. One leader explained this orientation: “As sisters, we made the hard choice not to have children. Through brain donation, we can help unravel the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and give the gift of life in a new way to future generations.”

Each sister who takes part in the study is given a series of physical and mental tests each year. In this way Snowdon and his associates keep track of the nuns’ health as they age. Through these tests, scrutiny of the records of each sister, and other diagnostic methods, the researchers have been able to draw some conclusions about aging. And, of course, rigorous examination of the brains of those sisters who have died have also revealed significant information.

Among these latter findings was the discovery that many of the women who continued to function adequately in old age had brains with some symptoms characteristic of Alzeimer’s, such as plaques and tangles. But even though they would seem to have had the disease, it did not impede their activities and they were judged to be mentally intact.

Snowdon summarizes this way: “Alzheimer’s is not a yes/no disease. Rather, it is a process – one that evolves over decades and interacts with many other factors.” So the evidence coming from examination of the brain can sometimes prove misleading.

Two factors that Snowdon considers important in the life of the sisters lie outside his scientific testing but deserve attention. The first is spirituality and the second is community. Of spirituality, he says: “My sense is that profound faith, like positive outlook, buffers the sorrows and tragedies that all of us experience.”

Of the second factor, he writes: “The community not only stimulates their minds, celebrates their accomplishments, and shares their aspirations, but also encourages their silences, intimately understands their defeats, and nurtures them when their bodies fail them.”

Ultimately, for Snowdon, the most amazing lesson from this study is that “Alzheimer’s disease is not an inevitable consequence of aging.” This lesson can offer some hope to people who feel anxious as we all await the scientific breakthrough that will free one day free the human family from this terrible affliction.

Richard Griffin

Have you seen the television ad showing a little old lady getting a helping hand from a young man as she crosses a parking lot? Normally, I am ad-adversive, but this one has caught my attention several times and held me fascinated.

The lady has just been food shopping and is presumably walking toward her car. When she meets the nicely dressed young professional, who works in a Citizens Bank branch at the supermarket, she asks him to lend her his arm. This he gladly does, assuming her automobile to be parked nearby. When she delivers her punch line, he has been clearly one-upped: “Oh, I don’t have a car,” she says sweetly.

This ad, I have discovered, was filmed last January in California. This information comes from the woman who stars in it. Last week I interviewed her by telephone in Forest Hills, New York where she has lived for a long time.

Her name is Mildred Clinton and she describes herself as a “character actress.” Over the telephone she sounds just as charming as she does in the ad. The extent of her work as an actress surprised and impressed me. She played the mother of the Al Pacino character in the film Serpico and she has appeared in three movies directed by Spike Lee.

Early in our conversation I told her my age of 74, hoping this would make it easier for her to tell me hers. But “women can’t tell their age,” she informed me firmly but sympathetically, thereby revealing she’s in a certain range. Also her frequent use of “Jiminy Cricket” as her expletive of choice suggests that she was not born the day before yesterday.

As the ad shows, Mildred is short in physical stature. “I always had a good figure,” she says of herself, but she was only five feet three-and-a- half inches in height. By now, she has become shorter still, she volunteers. In some of her ads and films she appears taller, however.

What most impressed me about Mildred Clinton is her zest for life. “I fall in love with whatever I’m doing because it’s always a challenge,” she says of her work.

Mildred is determined to resist negative thinking. “I think each of us is our own most severe critic,” she told me, “and some days I feel positively negative.” However, the personal dynamism of the woman became almost tangible to me in our phone conversation.

How does she feel about growing older? “I am very lucky,” she replies, “to be busy with work that I love. My whole life was set in a way in which you do interesting things.”

Her interesting things began long ago. She appeared in a play that featured Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne when it tried out in Boston decades ago. “They were amazing people,” she says of the Lunts. Remembering a certain by-play between them during a rehearsal, she still marvels at their exchange.

Sitting in the theater, Alfred Lunt called out to his wife “You’ve got too much eye makeup.” Lynne ignored him for a while but finally gave in. “Oh Alfred,” she exclaimed as she left to brush away some of the make up. Mildred still feels the music of Lynne’s voice in those two words “Oh Alfred.”

Mildred worked with another famous theatrical couple – Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. She thinks it was in a television drama rather than a performance on the stage. “You could have hugged them,” she says, as she recalls feeling tempted to ask Cronyn if she could.

Mildred Clinton appreciates late life in other ways as well. “Everything makes me feel rich,” she says. “When you’re young, 13 or 14, these things seem unreachable.”

The only downer in Mildred’s life is widowhood. She lost her husband to an early death, at age 42, and has lived by herself in Forest Hills since that time. She boasts of being a “distinguished alumna” of Brooklyn College where she majored in French.

Talking with this woman buoyed up my spirits. And that was without being able to accept right away her invitation to take me to lunch at Sardi’s,the famous Manhattan restaurant. At the end of our conversation, Mildred told me, “You’ve made my day!”  Those words exactly echoed my own sentiments.

For an appraisal of the ad, I turned to my favorite advertising guru, John Carroll. He appears on Boston’s public television show “Greater Boston,” for which he is executive producer. He thinks this ad “works” in delivering its message effectively.

Of Mildred Clinton’s performance, Carroll says, “She delivers a great punch line,” a sentiment that no doubt the veteran New York character actress and her fans will be happy to hear.

As to the view of aging presented here, Carroll gives this ad high marks. “It casts older people in a reasonably positive light,” he says. “I find it kind of endearing,” he adds.

So do I.

Richard Griffin