Each year, Cristina Cabreras, my daughter’s long-time school teacher, created a communal altar at school where the children would add pictures of people they had lost, along with little objects that those people liked: a piece of chocolate for a late great-grandfather, a ball of wool for a departed aunt. 

Then children, parents, teachers, and staff would gather to share stories to keep our loved ones alive in this ancestral way. It seemed so light and easy for the little ones to glide between worlds as if it were just another one of their playful activities of the day.

Last year, one of the first small gatherings I attended was with Perla Yasmeen Meléndez who guided my daughter and me in creating collages with photos of our dead and images we thought they would like. As we went through magazines, scissors and glue in hand, I was moved by the natural way in which I was becoming the link in this lineage. I was fulfilling my role of joining ancestors with their descendants. When the collages were done, we wrapped our creations around the tall glass of the ‘velones’ candles and used them as colorful additions to our altar.

This year, Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz, author of Earth Medicine, whom I learned about from Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, led an online gathering focused on creating an altar for ancestors. In this class, she taught us how to bring each element into the ceremony in a way that ushered the departed back to us.

She referred to our altars as portals to guide them home and by the end, they also felt like a portal of reassurance for each of us. Each one contained a candle to light the way, water to quench thirst on the long journey, aromatic copal to create a path of scent. 

As a nature practice teacher, I have enjoyed integrating these Día de los Muertos rituals into my personal nature celebrations over the years. Here are three words and reflections that have struck me along that way—each one continuing to enrich my life long after the holiday has passed. 

Though risk of death was lower, especially due to those two defined causes, the researchers did note that higher ALA intake was also associated with a slightly higher risk of cancer. Specifically, they found that there were 63 extra cancer deaths in the groups with the highest compared compared to the lower levels of ALA intake.

They also point out that, though many studies were considered, they were observational studies, which means it’s not possible to claim causality. So while there may be a link between higher ALA intake and lower risk of death, based on this data, researchers can’t say for certain that eating more foods with ALA will promote longevity.

If living longer is your aim, there are some other things that longevity experts swear are key to a long life: Sergey Young has made it his personal mission to live to 200, and he shared his ultimate list of must-do’s with us on the mindbodygreen podcast.

As we write this, Richard is 76; Dave is 63. Obviously, we’re old. But in other senses, we’re not old at all. As we look back across the decades, the words of Bob Dylan in “My Back Pages” come to mind: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Spoiler alert: You’re getting older; everyone alive is getting older. Eventually, if you live long enough, you’ll be what is sometimes referred to as “old old.” And yet, it’s almost taboo to talk about getting old, much less acknowledge being old. Yet in spite of all the denial, most people want to live to be as old as possible.

Always on the move, William H. Thomas, M.D., author of What Are Old People For?: How Elders Will Save the World, is a man with a purpose: to challenge conventional views of aging.

Far ahead of his time, “Dr. Bill,” a Harvard Medical School–trained geriatrician, is particularly well known for pioneering the Eden Alternative, a radical system of humanizing nursing homes by introducing plants, pets, and even children into the environment. Now, he has given up practicing in favor of proselytizing about what it means to grow old.

In conversation with Richard, he says, “My view as a geriatrician is that we have to grow up twice—from childhood to adulthood and from adulthood to elderhood. If we don’t mature during adolescence, all kinds of alarms go off. But for the second phase, there are no bells, beacons, alarms, or rituals if we miss it. I see aging as a strength, rich in developmental growth. What we need is a radical reimagining of longevity that makes elders central to our collective pursuit of happiness. How we perceive aging to a very large degree determines how we age. It’s the story that matters. How people interpret their experience goes a long way to determining their well-being.”

According to Thomas, our culture rewards the ideal of an older person who “still” does what they used to do. They fill their life with what has historically given them pleasure and fulfillment. They define success in backward-looking terms. The older person is admirable because they’re still acting like a younger person.

But if “still” signifies success, then people who can’t “still” do those younger things are failures. “This is wrong,” contends Thomas. “We need to push the delete key on ‘still.’ In older adulthood, the word still is a sign of success; in childhood development, by contrast, the word still is a sign of failure.”

As a geriatrician, Thomas believes that embracing death is a path to a more meaningful life. He has observed that “the happiest people are those who have chosen to shed the illusion of immortality. Knowing they have limited time, they focus more on purposeful relationships and less on pleasing others, less on stuff, more on experience. They choose to be their authentic selves.”

Currently, Thomas, on the cusp of elderhood himself, is focused on helping people of all ages to live in the place and manner of their choosing. “We’re lucky if we get to grow old,” he says. “I want to help people grow whole, not old.”

This article was co-written by David A. Shapiro.

Reprinted from Who Do You Want To Be When You Grow Old?: The Path of Purposeful Aging with permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Copyright © 2021 by Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro. 

A few medical doctors are now studying people who were clinically dead, revived, and then had what is called an NDE—near-death experience, in which they might “see the light,” be greeted by their deceased loved ones, float out of their bodies, and later repeat conversations or occurrences that happened on the other side.

Bruce Greyson, M.D., professor emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor at NYU’s Department of Medicine, are two doctors who stood out to me.

They both found that some of these NDEs were verifiable in that people come back with accurate information. For example, at times, the person who had the near-death experience saw a deceased loved one who had a message for a living person that made no sense to the NDE-er but that the living person understood.

There are also some similarities within reported NDEs: Many people are told by beings—either their deceased loved ones or higher beings like guides—that they have to return to the living because it is not their time. Some are given a choice to come back or not. The majority of them say that while the experience was transformative, it is impossible to really describe, like explaining sight to a blind person.

Most people who have NDEs also seem to return profoundly changed. They are much less interested in the material world and making money and frequently state the purpose of life is to help others and to love. They no longer fear death. This lasts for years after their NDE, according to follow-up research.

I think as technology improves and we are able to resuscitate more people who are further along in death, we will start to hear more about these fascinating experiences.

Mindfulness is one powerful way to relearn how to grieve. Not only is mindfulness a tool for living with loss, but it also has a lot in common with grief.

Grief, like mindfulness, is a practice. Think about how much effort it took the first time you ever sat down to meditate. You probably experienced significant distraction, self-judgement, discomfort, and the strong questioning of why you were there in the first place. This is similar of grief. 

Grief, like mindfulness, starts off requiring a lot from you. It is overwhelming, uncomfortable, and effortful. Though this ebbs and flows, both practices need tending through your entire life.

Grief, like mindfulness, is not something you accomplish or something you can complete. It is something that you build a long-term relationship with. At times it may feel like a hurricane, and other times, it will feel like a gentle spring breeze.

Grief, like mindfulness, takes participation. It requires presence, acceptance, and intention.